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Its the holiday season as we all know, and once again that means the shoppers are out. To help them out there are lots of shopping helpers on the App Catalog. Earlier we reviewed easyShop and TealShopper, and today we are adding to that list Dealert. Now it is a different beast than the other two because instead of organizing your shopping list, this app helps you find the items you want to buy on the cheap.
Dealert is by Kevin Foreman and costs $1.99 on the Catalog. The purpose of this app is to hunt down the items you want to buy for Christmas (birthday,bar mitzvah, etc.) and try and find the best deals for them. What this boils down to is basically two pieces: the stores and the deals hunter.
The stores are product feeds from various websites that have all sorts of items and goodies on them. I haven’t heard of some of these (FatWallet.com, BradsDeals.com), but a few of them are big names like NewEgg, Amazon, and Woot. So with this part of the app you can open up each feed and see what they have available. The main screen shows all the stores you have setup and how many products they are currently showing. Click on a store and it gives you the details of what they have to sell you. Some of the feeds have images of the items, others are just pure text. Either way, they are nicely laid out and easy to read.
The other side of the app is what I call the hunter. Here you can type in some keywords and Dealert will go tearing through the feeds on a regular basis and see if any of the sites have what you are looking for. I think this is cool in concept, but in my limited experience, I wasn’t able to find most of the items I was looking for. In my test I put in the following items: xbox 360, bosch screwdriver, zune hd, dragon age, polo shirt, and toy atm machine. Of all of those items it found a lot of 360 stuff (this could be anything from the console, to a game controller, to cables), 1 zune hd combo, and 2 toy atm machines. I picked toy atm machine because I saw that exact phrase in a store so I am not sure that one counts, but at least it found it…in two different stores no less.
Once you find an item that you like, you can click on it and either email the link to yourself to purchase it later, or you can visit the store and buy it right there. Nicely done.
One thing also to keep in mind is that most of the stores are very tech heavy. So if you are searching for some body lotion or something girly for your wife/girlfriend, then you may not find many deals (there will be some, just not many compared to a PS3). On the other hand, if you are a woman shopping for a geek, then you have hit the motherload. What struck me as something sorely missing is the ability to add your own feed. If that is technically difficult, then at the very least we need to get a wider array of feeds in the store.
- Easy to read, easy to use
- The shopping side of things is nice. It is an easy way to go on a quick shopping spree and maybe catch a good deal.
- The deals it has in the store are nice and would easily pay for this app many times over.
- Very tech centric…I am a huge geek and I love my gizmos, but when I am shopping, most of the people I am shopping for are not like me in that regard.
- The deal hunter side of things either doesn’t find anything for you, or it finds a ton of items that may or may not be useful in your search.
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The concept behind Dealert is great, but the execution makes it hard to recommend, at least for now. Ironically, I found that if you don’t know what you are looking for the app serves a valuable function because it brings a bunch of stores right to your fingertips.
I believe this app has a lot of potential, but it hasn’t gotten there quite yet. If a lot more feeds are added in future updates, and you can somehow make the hunting algorithm to get more relevant results, then you may have a real winner here. Until then, I think I will just keep shopping at Amazon.
thanks for the info!