Smarter.com Launches Comparison Shopping via SMS

Have you ever been at Best Buy staring at a great gadget but unsure if you can get it cheaper online? If you had you PC in front of you, you could visit some of the many comparison shopping sites such as pricegrabber.com or Google's Froogle.com. Well, now you can do the same from your mobile phone. Even though Google was the first to offer users to query its database, the results it returns are not always the ones with the lowest price – pretty much it chooses a random merchant and returns its price. On the contrary, Smarter.com returns the lowest price it can find for the particular product.

When I tested Froogle and sent sms requesting the price of Canon A75 camera (“Price canon a75”) I got three results back – $173.25, $199.00, $199.98. When I went to Froogle.com via my PC and did a search, the lowest price was $136.00. Sending SMS to Smarter.com (“Canon a75”) got me 159.00 deal.

Consumers can access the free Smarter SMS service by text messaging product names or SKUs (commonly known as manufacturer part numbers) to (610) SMARTER or (610) 762-7837. Consumers are free to search using generic keywords like ‘mini ipods' or ‘dell dimension', but are recommended to be as specific as possible, using the SKU number for best results.