Tiffany Raiford
There’s an app for that; no, really, there is an app for just about everything from holiday shopping to parking to finding someone’s mom to cook you dinner because yours is too far away and you’re missing home tonight. All right, maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch, but you get the point. Holiday shopping has never been easier than it is now that we have technology on our side. We can shop, find apps to help us and never have to worry that we are wasting our time and making our lives even more complicated than they need to be. As you finish up your holiday shopping on this Christmas week (or start, you brave soul), let some apps do the bulk of the work for you. When you do it this way, you will find that life is about as simple as it gets.
Since no one loves to holiday shop with the crowds and the crowd rage that comes along with it, we have a few apps here that are going to minimize your stress and maximize your shopping potential. Now maybe you’ll come home feeling more like Santa and less like the Grinch after leaving the mall. We hope so, anyway; best of luck with that one you last minute shopper, you.
Listen, I know it’s not really a Christmas shopping app, but with all the mess that is holiday shopping right now, it’s a great app to have. Let’s say you did what I did last weekend when shopping with a girlfriend. We went to a mall we are not really familiar with, found out very quickly that valet service is not available there, and we had to park ourselves. I parked my car and promptly forgot where inside this huge mall with all these stores and no real landmarks that we noticed coming in. This app was a great solution for me since I was then able to locate my car via GPS with the location finder. Additionally, if you plan on doing any holiday traveling, you’ll find it’s much easier to locate your car with this app in the airport parking lot than it is to just remember where you put the car after you’ve been gone for a few days at a time. I cannot tell you how much I recommend this app to everyone. It’s a good one to have this time of year, and we think you might use this one more than the rest of them.
One way that many people are able to shop for their holiday gifts is through the ability to sell the things they have around the house that they no longer want or need. This is a great way to find some sales and deals, and it’s a great way to make a little money on the side. What we love about PoshMark is that it enables you to go ahead and list items you have for sale at home, track the interest in them and make a little cash. It also allows you to shop for high-end items that you might want to put under the tree for someone else, at a much lower price. It’s a great app that has quickly become one of the most go-to apps around the holiday season for those who are interested in saving money and earning money at the same time.
Do you love a sale? I know that I love when I don’t have to spend full price on something that I want to or have to purchase to make all my people’s Christmas wishes come true. I love that I can scan the barcode of an item and find it on sale somewhere when the sales are better. With this app, you can scan an item’s barcode and the app will tell you if the item is on sale for a better price elsewhere. Basically, you can walk into Toys R Us and scan the barcode of the dollhouse your niece wants for Christmas to find out if this is where you should make your purchase or if you should shop elsewhere. It will tell you if it’s cheaper down the street at Target or if it’s on sale where you are. It’s a great app, and it’s one that I think everyone will love.
This is a great app that I just adore. It’s the one that allows me to find the most comprehensive coupons and promos from my favorite stores, and it allows me to use it at home shopping online or at the store when I’m standing in line. I can find the store I’m in and then pull up the latest coupons for a great deal. In fact, I used it the other day when I was in Bath and Body Works to receive $10 off my $30 or more purchase. I also used it recently when I was in Carters to receive 20% off my $40 or more purchase. All I had to do was open the app and bring up the store, the coupon was right there and the cashier was able to scan it with her magic handheld computer so that I was able to receive the discount I needed. It’s always a nice moment in life when you are able to save without doing anything at all.
This app changed my life on Black Friday. My husband and I decided we would Black Friday shop this year because his mother so kindly asked us if we’d like to go out and she’d keep the kids. As all my parent-peeps know, you do not turn down an offer of a babysitter, especially when said sitter is the grandmother of your four beautiful kids and the kids love her more than they love you, anyway (so it seems). We accepted, and then I used this app. It allowed me to take all the ads from the Thanksgiving paper and scan them into the app. This way, I didn’t have to cut out coupons for 10% off my Toys R Us purchase or 50% off my holiday purchase at Target and keep them somewhere in my already messy and full handbag. I simply opened up the app, handed my phone to the cashier who scanned it, put it away and reaped in the glow of huge Black Friday savings.
In our home, we have very, very tall ceilings. Most of the house is 14-feet and then the entire front of the house is 24-feet. We have this insane desire to have a huge Christmas tree every year, too. So when I was calling around to find out who had some 20-foot trees, I was on hold forever half the places I called (only to find that that, no, they do not have trees taller than 12-feet). It was frustrating and irritating, and that’s when someone on my social media pages said I should try this app. It’s called TalkTo and it makes that on-hold annoyance go away. What this app does is allow me to ask questions to local businesses via text message. This allows me to get a response within 5 minutes so that I save time and energy, and a lot of my frustration. Additionally, it’s not just for shopping, it’s for restaurants, spas and anywhere else. Basically, if you want an item for someone for Christmas but you don’t want to go driving around to a dozen places only to find out no one has it, this is the app for you.
I don’t know about you, but my inbox is slammed every single day with hundreds of promotional emails from companies that are dying for me to shop their stores and give me discounts and deals. Most I ignore, moving them directly to my trash and pretending that they are not cluttering up my inbox with emails for 50% off (unless that one is from Nordstrom, I don’t want it). Unfortunately, I then go shopping only to realize that I’m in the middle of a store and I know that I recently saw an ad come through my inbox touting some amazing sale from that location that I no longer have. I can’t find it anywhere, and it’s annoying. This app saves me that trouble by taking those promotional emails and turning them into saved items within the app. The app then organizes all the ads and provides them for me when I need them most – even when I don’t think that I need them at all.
I’m not even going to tell you how many times I make the mistake of going shopping without my card on me. It’s an innocent mistake, really, but it happens far more often than I care to admit. I have a dirty habit of taking my card out to pay for my coffee or my purchase at a retailer and then just tossing it inside my handbag without a second thought. You know, because why would I want to take that extra second to stick it back in my wallet like a human being? What this does for me is essentially nothing good. What it does for me is prevent me from being able to use my card when I shop if I switch bags and grab my wallet, cosmetics bag and the like. It’s a common problem for women, so I’m more often than not without my card. Thankfully, I have it memorized (though cashiers hate when I try to tell them this information). This is an app that allows you to store your credit cards, your debit cards and your rewards cards so that you don’t have to clutter up your bag with everything you need to shop. It works with the Apple Passbook to allow you to use the app more effectively, and we love it.
Sometimes all we want is a great sale, and we cannot find one. That’s where this app comes in handy. Let’s say you’ve been looking at a particular gift for someone on your Christmas list, but you’re hoping that it goes on sale before too long. This app allows you to entire the product in which you are interested so that you can see when the prices drop. The app tracks the item at every retailer available and notifies you when the price does drop so you know where to get the best deal. To add to that, the app also provides shoppers with great coupons and discount codes that might help you continue to find good deals in other locations. The only issue with this app is you – you have to know that certain items simply do not ‘go on sale,’ and that means you’ll use it fruitlessly. For example, you will not find an Hermes bag or Louis Vuitton sale, and even Apple won’t drop prices on anything most of the time. So don’t expect to find things that don’t go on sale on sale.
If you want to get paid to shop, you can do it very easily with very minimal effort. One great way to do this is through the Shopkick app. This app allows you to get points, or kicks as they are called on the app, for doing things like trying on clothes or scanning barcodes. You can then find the available opportunities through the app so you know what you do and where to go to do it. When you have enough kicks, you can redeem them for gift cards to your favorite stores. If you go as far as linking your debit and credit cards to the account, you can automatically receive kicks for certain purchases when your receipt is read through the card. It’s a simple way to earn free gift cards and the like, and you cannot argue with that method of shopping.
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