iPhone App Review: CardStar Membership Card Saver

Posted by: Spencer // January 12 2010

When sitting with a friend over the summer, I came up with the perfect idea for an iPhone app. I’m tired of carrying savings cards for stores on my key ring, so I thought it would be great to have an app that would allow you to enter in your membership numbers into your phone, and then show your phone at the retail point of sale. Unfortunately, two other companies already had the same idea. I decided that the next best thing would be to test one of the two out and review it here. I chose to try CardStar (iTunes Affiliate Link).

CardStar does what it says it will for the most part. Here’s how it works:

Select a retailer from the retail list.
Enter the loyalty code found underneath the UPC code on your loyalty card and hit enter (this is an area where mistakes obviously cause problems).
Repeat for all your loyalty programs.

I’ve been using the app for three months pretty regularly, at stores such as Best Buy, BJ’s, CVS, DSW Shoe Stores, Giant Supermarkets, and PetSmart. Once your cards are in the database, using the program is easy. You simply start the program, select the appropriate retailer, and have the barcode that appears on the screen open for use with the scanner at checkout. It works fairly well with some big caveats. First off, forget using the app with flatbed scanners - at self-checkout it’s pretty useless. With a hand scanner, it seems to work about 85-90% of the time. The rest of the time you’ll have people standing behind you and cursing you. Another issue I had to overcome was cashier doubt – a few cashiers wouldn’t even try the app; they didn’t believe it would work.

Recent updates have improved the efficiency of the application and added the ability to add retailers that aren’t in their database. I haven’t tried this yet, but something tells me that the process is less than foolproof. All in all, this app delivers fairly well on its promise. Not being able to use flatbed scanners is an annoyance, but in general it works.

Sly line: I’m not deleting it from my iPhone any time soon. I now walk around with a key ring that is minus any key fobs, and for the rare occasion where it doesn’t work, I have the membership numbers in my phone for a cashier to enter manually. Overall, it’s pretty sly.

CardStar is currently only available for the iPhone, but is coming soon for Android and Blackberry mobile phones.

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