Continuing with the holiday shopping theme I started yesterday, Snappr (snappr.mobi) is an online shopping search and price comparison site.  It’s the mobile variant of Snappr.net on the web. Snappr is new, both the .net and the .mobi launched this year.

The mobile site opens to a simple search box where you can enter a product name or the number that appears under the UPC bar code found  on most products.  Snappr returns a list of products with price, a picture and user rating if available. The site is available in English and German and can be used anywhere in the world.

Does this sound familiar?  Snappr is a near clone of Barcle which I reviewed in Feburary.  To Snappr’s credit, it’s a more attractive site than Barcle and seems to work better too.  Searching is much faster and the bar code database seems more complete.  In a quick test with three products, a prepaid mobile phone, a book, and an analog to digital TV converter box, Snappr found the phone and the book, while Barcle found none of the items.  Plus, Snappr shows prices in the search results list, while Barcle requires you to drill down into each item’s detail page to find the cost.

It’s not all rosy with Snappr though. Products are returned in random order rather than sorted in some logical fashion like by price from lowest to highest. The prices shown are often wildly different than the actual price on the retailer’s site. Like that SIM card for $1.19 shown in the screenshot.  The actual price on Amazon is 29.99! There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, sometimes Snappr’s price is higher than the real price, sometimes lower.

Like almost every mobile shopping site, actually making a purchase can be difficult. There is a “Buy..” link for each item which goes to the retailer offering the product.  But the link often goes to a full web page that is impossible to use on a mobile. Fortunately many of Snappr’s items are sourced on Amazon.com which does deliver a mobile page whenever it detects a mobile browser. Registered Amazon users with a credit card on file can even make “1-click” purchases on the Amazon mobile site.

Snappr also has an iPhone app that can use the phone’s camera to capture product bar codes so you don’t have to key in those long strings of digits. That’s a great idea which I hope they extend to other platforms. I don’t have an iPhone to try it out with but according to a post on the Agregated Intelligence Blog, it works but is harder to use than Android’s ShopSavvy due to limitations of the iPhone’s SDK. Source: Mobility.mobi

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Shopping

Ratings: Content:  Usability: 

Mobile Link: snappr.mobi