Organizing Your Affinity

Plastic card paralysis.  That’s what I call it anyway.  Every store wants you to sign up for their frequent shopper clubs (officially known as affinity cards), and every time you do they give you another plastic card to lug around in your purse or wallet.  While stores have been somewhat sympathetic to your plight through the use of key fobs or alterative ID’s, it is still a hassle to remember what cards you have and when to use them.

Enter technology!  Two major apps, Keyring and Cardstar, now exist for use on your smart phone that allow you to organize your frequent shopper cards into one easy to use and rarely forgotten at home device. 

A great feature of both apps is their ability to ‘push’ (the act of sending you information) coupons, discounts, and special offers based upon merchants who you theoretically already like in real life, since you are carrying their shopper card.   Many merchants also allow you to join their shopper program ‘on the fly’ from the apps.   The apps are also quickly evolving into a sort of ‘FourSquare’ for shopping, combining many of the features we highlighted during our discussion of location based social networks. The iPad version of the applications will also allow you to browse the grocery circulars and ‘clip’ coupons to your iPad for use the next time you are in the store.

The functionality of both applications is very similar.  To begin, you must let the application know which frequent shopper programs you belong.  This is accomplished by first finding the merchant whose card you will be entering from a very large list of possible merchants.  Then by using the scanner functionality built into the app or by keying your id in manually the applications will then store the bar code associated with your shopper club membership.  Even if your merchant isn’t listed, the apps have you covered by allowing you to enter your own favorite merchants.  Now that you have your cards entered, simply pull up the app when you are checking out and scan the bar code stored within your phone.

Now that functionality does come with a caveat.  For one reason or another, some checkout scanners do not like reading bar codes off of another screen (ie. your phone).  When this happens you, or the clerk, must manually key in your card id.  Considering that most of my shopper cards are so well worn that I must do that anyway, I don’t find this to be much of an inconvenience.  As technology continues to advance, this should be come less of an issue and allow for apps like these to become a must have shopping accessory.

As we’ve already discussed, both of these applications have many of the same features and behave much the same way, so which application is best for you really boils down to personal choice.  Both apps are free so download and use them both to see which application feels right to you. 

Keyring  http://www.keyringapp.com

Cardstar:  http://www.mycardstar.com

As always, we want to hear from you!  If you have any questions about managing your frequent shopper cards or anything relating to today’s technology, feel free to Tweet us, post in the comments below, on the Taming Technology Facebook page or on our website!  We may even answer your question on air in the upcoming weeks!

Next week:  Viewer mailbag!  Rob will be answering your questions on air!  Submit any technology related question you have via our Facebook page, comments section or Twitter! 

C Robert Dillon is the digital developer at WISH-TV in Indianapolis and serves as a technology consultant and on-air contributor to WISH as well as the technology expert and host of the Taming Technology segment on Indy Style. Opinions presented are those of the author and not necessarily of LIN Media, WISH-TV, or Indy Style.

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