Grocery Companion is an application designed to consolidate the various activities related to grocery shopping. Within the application user’s input the groceries they need. After listing items, users “press” a button and the app searches a set list of sources for coupons for every item in the list. After all coupons are collected, the app returns a message holding information regarding how many coupons were found and how much the total savings/value of the coupons is worth.
The items in the list are automatically sorted by general location, like items listed near each other. As the user shops, they scan the shelf tag for the item using their cell phone camera. The app then decodes the tag, getting the price of the item and adding it to the total. To remove an item the user presses a button to remove and rescans the item’s UPC, which should match the UPC of the shelf tag, or they can simply remove the item from the list directly.
Upon check out, the user will know the total with and without coupons. At the register, the user can pull up all of the coupons related to the current shopping list. He/she then presses a button to “pull up” all of the related coupons as images and can swipe through them as the cashier scans each coupon.
After paying, the application gives a report on how much was spent and how much was saved. If the user did not purchase all of the items on the list, the app asks if they would like to keep the remaining items on the list or remove them. Often purchased items will be remembered for future shopping lists and offered as a list to the user to reduce list input time.