Max out your purchasing power with these AI-enhanced shopping tools
Find the lowest price
Karma, Honey and the rather more self-explanatory ShopSavvy are just three examples of apps that use AI to survey the market and reveal where a given product is cheapest – whether online or at a physical store. Of course, price trackers, primarily in the form of websites, have been around for years, but it takes AI to scan a large number of retailers in real time and update you as prices fluctuate. Bear in mind, of course, that some tracking apps may be biased in one way or another, depending on their funding model, so check more than one source.
Offer code and discounts
With so many online retailers these days offering attractive discounts to get you on board, it helps to have the power of AI on your side. Koupon is one such tool, allowing you to find any number of ‘enter at checkout’ discount codes: while you could simply perform a standard web search for the codes you need instead, you won’t know if said codes are current or if they expired two years ago. Why waste time tapping obsolete (and annoying) strings of characters such as GIMME10PCOFFNOW into a box when an app can do it for you?
Fly for less
Looking for a flight? Given how much airlines vary their prices on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, finding the lowest-priced ticket is a difficult task – which is where AI comes in. Analysing cost patterns over time, apps such as Hopper, AirTrack and AirHint are able to tell you when your desired flight is likely to be cheapest. While human intuition might find it hard to detect this kind of pattern with so much data to sort, a job such as this is obviously what generative AI was built for. Sadly, these apps can’t choose flights with the best (or least terrible) food.
Cashback Schemes
“Buy this sofa/car/set of ornamental spoons and get 10% back!” has been a frequent accompaniment to more or less any online transaction for some years now, the difference with the latest generation of apps being that yep, they use AI. Some of these, like Minty, do the job of actually getting you the cash sums you want based on the purchases you’ve made; others, like Upside, will track down the available deals for commodities such as petrol in areas local to you. In either case, machine learning is being deployed to mine data and come up with ways to make your money work harder.
Track price across multiple stores
Most of the apps listed here do a version of the same job, in other words getting you the product you want at the best price, but others – Gosh is an example – offer a valuable nuance by keeping an eye on several online (and in some cases, also offline) prices for the same product, in real time. This is obviously useful because it means you don’t have to check vendors in sequence over a period of time when prices will update simultaneously. This is useful for things like comparing the cost of your weekly shop at different supermarkets, such as on Shopsplit, for example. Think of AI, in this case, as a person who can do the same simple job at the same time many times over.
Find what you need without needing it
You know you need some form of jacket for the winter, or some kind of wedding gift for a friend – you just don’t know what you want beyond that basic description. We’ve all been in that frustrating situation. Well, assistance is at hand with tools such as Shop.app, which you tell roughly what you’re looking for and which then responds with specific suggestions. It will then walk you through the details, gradually zeroing in on items you didn’t know you needed – but which you’ll recognise when you get there. Budget and location details help the AI find you what you want.
Be more eco-friendly
Several AI-powered shopping apps focus on the environmentally sound nature of your purchases, reflecting society’s growing concern with the welfare of the planet. These include Giki, Good On You and Green Choice Now, each of which will supply you with the carbon cost of your purchase as well as the associated environmental impact of making, distributing and using whatever you’re buying. As we discuss elsewhere in these pages, the use of AI does itself incur an environmental cost due to water use in server farms, so keep that in mind. You might be better off shopping in physical stores, in eco terms at least.
Check and summarize reviews
Buying from Amazon? ShopGuru scans product reviews to save you having to go through them yourself, a serious time-saver when you think how many thousands of reviews some items attract. A downside is that the app is not immune to fake reviews, a growing problem not just on Amazon but everywhere, so stay frosty and don’t believe everything you read. Assuming that bogus ratings are in the minority for whatever you’re buying, though, you’ll get a reasonably accurate idea of what most people think of the product you’re splashing out for. Just don’t take too many specific details at face value.
Voice assistants
Only the most credulous Alexa user would fail to understand that the ubiquitous AI device is not just there to play our music, set timers and tell us recipes. It’s there thanks to its owners Amazon’s interest in having a product in our homes that can and will happily take orders for Amazon deliveries, simply by telling it to do so. Now, is this a bad thing in and of itself? Not as we see it. If you follow basic protocols for security when it comes to financial transactions, an Alexa (aka Echo) can be a very convenient time-saving tool.
AI stylists
StyleDNA, AI Outfit Generator, Combyne, Whering… if you’re looking for the best way to match the items in your wardrobe so that they make a cool combination when worn together, no end of AI-driven apps will be happy to advise you. This does rather presuppose that you have a massive number of clothing items in varying colours and styles, rather than one pair of jeans and three black T-shirts, but if you do indeed possess so many clothes that you tend to forget what’s at the back of the wardrobe, pick a helpful app and let its fashion-savvy AI do the work.
Personalised shoppers
Klarna and App0 are, their marketing spiel suggests, akin to your ‘shopping BFF’ – a helpful person who knows what you like and wants to help you find it. Essentially, this is the same two-way process that actual real-life personalised shoppers used to do for you – in other words, you give them a vague outline and they come back with detailed ideas – but with built-in AI scanning a much wider range of options for you. These apps are particularly good at refining ideas, by which we mean looking at a given product and then selecting another one just like the first – but slightly better.
Real time checks
Finally! You’ve found the item you want to buy and you’re happy with its price. You click ‘Add to Basket’ – but the website or app you’re using tells you that it’s out of stock. Or worse, you spend time and money going to the store for a specific item… only to find an empty shelf. Avoid this annoyance by using an app such as StockChecker, which tells you where the good stuff is as well as comparing prices; Karma, which also offers a coupon-scanning option; or HotStock, which notifies you when the item you’re after is back in stock after a period of unavailability. The only challenge then is to buy the sought-after goods before someone else gets there first, right?
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