During last year’s holiday shopping season, Amazon released Price Check for the iPhone, a comparison shopping app which allows users can scan the barcode of a product, take a picture of an item or say the product’s name to access product listings on Amazon.com’s marketplace. Today, the e-commerce giant is launching the app on Android phones.

Shoppers use the Price Check app to scan a barcode, snap a picture, or say or type a product name to see prices from Amazon.com’s marketplace and its 2 million online merchants. One exclusive feature to the Android app is the ability to scan in either portrait or landscape mode. The app will display prices sorted from lowest to highest and will also show if the item is available for free shipping.

Users can read product reviews, add the item to a wishlist, share the item and decide whether the Amazon offering is a better deal than the store offering. Shoppers can then purchase the item with 1-Click shopping. Amazon says Price Check includes prices on ‘millions of products’, from books to HDTVs to blenders to baby strollers.

Amazon says that so far this year, shoppers with iPhones choose Price Check’s barcode scanner to check prices more than any other search method available with the Price Check app and use Price Check ‘millions of times’, most frequently on weekends.

The app is similar to eBay’s RedLaser scanning app, which includes similar functionality and the ability to buy items directly from eBay. Amazon also recently released Flow, which uses augmented reality to help users explore and discover tens of millions of products in a real world setting, including books, DVDs, packaged electronics and toys.

Crunchbase

• AMAZON

Company: Amazon

Website: amazon.com

Launch Date: 1994

IPO: NASDAQ:AMZN

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...

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