New iOS App SnapUp Could Help Shoppers Find The Hottest Deals [VIDEO]

What if mobile shopping could be as simple as taking a screenshot on your iPhone? A new application launching today on the iTunes App Store called SnapUp allows users to bookmark and track products by snapping a picture on any iOS device.

The app then alerts its users when their “favorite” items drop in price by using a patent-pending technology to recognize and process screenshots taken of product pages on their iPhone's screen.

Shan Mehta, co-founder of SnapUp, spoke to International Business Times about how the free app works and why the company “saw a need to reinvent mobile shopping.”

What is SnapUp?

The startup was founded in 2013 by Mehta, who previously worked in e-commerce and investing, along with engineers Dan Cheung and Eric Goldberg, a One Kings Lane alum and the first engineer at StumbleUpon. Mehta said that with a “snap,” the app tracks products on any retailer’s mobile app or website and compiles them all in one place.

“There’s a 160 million people estimated to be shopping on their mobile phone next year. Wherever people are, they have this device with them,” Mehta said to IBTimes. “They’re shopping on it. They’re searching for products. They’re browsing through products. But then there’s no way to aggregate all of that shopping into one place, organize it and make it really easy to go back to the products that you like to track them. Prices change constantly on e-commerce sites and within apps. We want to solve that problem.”

How SnapUp Works: Snap, Organize And Buy

The SnapUp team built its smart technology to alert users when prices drop on their items by taking screenshots taken from inside mobile browsers and in apps. For example, whether a user is browsing sites such as Amazon or Pinterest, Urban Outfitters or Zappos, the app constantly monitors a user’s products and alerts them when something goes on sale.

“We’re debuting something really brand new,” Mehta said. “We’re using this mechanism to actually bookmark the products. We spent the last eight months building that technology, which is taking those screen shots, extracting that data out of them and then connecting that with our technology on the backend, which actually finds those products.”

Snap

With access to your iPhone’s camera roll, SnapUp recognizes and transforms the screenshots users have taken, then adds those items to their SnapUp account. If a user is browsing products in an app or in a mobile browser on their iPhone, the user can take a screenshot of any item they want to keep tabs on.

What about privacy? SnapUp said the app will ask users for permission to access the camera roll on their iPhone and will never upload any of their photos.

“Using patent-pending technology, SnapUp detects and processes only the screenshots you take and ignores photos and any screenshots that aren't products,” SnapUp said in the press release. “We don’t share the products you’re tracking with anyone, and we’ll never post anything to Facebook or other social networks.”

Organize

From there, users can keep track of their items as well as create and share lists. Swipe motions allow users to organize snaps into customized lists so they can categorize and manage everything they are shopping for.

Buy

SnapUp alerts users when the price drops on an item they have “snapped,” so they can be sure they are up to speed on the latest deal. The company said to click the “Buy” button in the app to purchase the product when the price is right.

Download the iOS app here: snapup.com/download

SnapUp Raises $600,000 From Investors

SnapUp has so far raised an advisory round of $600,000 from investors, including StumbleUpon co-founder Geoff Smith, Yahoo! executive Maria Zhang and Facebook executives Javier Olivan and Jay Parikh.

“We want to make this an amazing user experience,” Mehta said. “Shopping on mobile is really up for grabs. Nobody is doing it really, really well. We want to gain as much information about how much consumers love our app before we build one for Android.”