Recently, I blogged about the birth of new shopping/mobile couponing app Shopular. Shopular curates a collage of sale ads from stores near you, so you always have a heads up on sales and you can strategically plan where to buy your next winter sweater, depending on which offers are currently going on where. I like Shopular – a lot. It’s become one of my essential shopping apps; I consult Shopular before I even enter the mall, so I know which stores to hit and which store to skip (I don’t buy anything if it’s not on sale or I don’t have a coupon). The app does a great job scouting sales even I haven’t heard about. I scored a great a deal on a gorgeous black moto bag at Urban Outfitters recently, and I wouldn’t have done it without Shopular.
Shopular works well as a sales navigator, but not so much as a mobile couponing app. For one thing, many of Shopular’s “coupons” are actually just ads for store promotions, repackaged to look like exclusive offers. A good chunk of Shopular “coupons” will tell you “No Coupon Required!” when you click on them to redeem the deal. Which feels very misleading to me. I think it’s important to keep track of what’s a store sale vs. what’s a store coupon. In my book, coupons trump store sales, because, oftentimes, you can combine a coupon with a store sale to get an even greater discount, as is the case with many Ulta store coupons.
I also don’t love that Shopular doesn’t consistently offer store coupon staples, like the $3.50 off $10 and 20% off total purchase coupons you’ll always find for Ulta in SnipSnap.
Then there’s the question of which app’s coupons are, on average, a better value. Right now, there’s a coupon in the Shopular app for $10 off a $40 purchase at Bath & Body Works. Which sounds like a great deal, until you snip this coupon for $10 off a $30 purchase at Bath & Body Works in the SnipSnap app.
I guess the bottom lin
e is that, with Shopular, as with shopkick, you’re not only getting curated look books and store ads, you’re getting curate coupons too. The coupons you’ll find in Shopular are not necessarily the only ones out there. They’re not necessarily the highest-value. And they might not actually even be coupons.
I think Shopular’s fantastic and I wouldn’t go shopping without it. However, for mobile couponing, SnipSnap is my absolute mainstay, because I’m the one who gets to search for and select the very best coupons for my shopping needs, from thousands of other coupons uploaded by other real life shoppers like me.
