LoveList App Scans Physical Products to Pin on Pinterest

Valentine’s Day is approaching, and with it comes the uncertainty of which gift to get for your new significant other, or the search for a gift that says it all for your tested-and-true love, or the need for self-indulgence for the independent and single or the hopeless romantic. No matter what stage of life you’re at, or what your specific interests are, the iPhone app LoveList can help you quickly and easily pin items you love to your Pinterest boards, to share or to keep track of for yourself.

Before now, in order to pin something to Pinterest, you would have to take a photo of it or find it online and pin the link. Now, you can simply scan the barcode of a physical item—simply is a key word here. LoveList is made for a single purpose: to scan barcodes of items you want to pin, and then send them to a selected Pinterest board. That’s it. But, it does that single purpose well, and that means anyone can use it. It’s good for beginners because it’s simple, and it’s good for the experienced because it’s efficient. However, since it is so simple, and went from concept to working app so quickly, there are limitations. Currently, only items in Amazon’s product database are recognized. Though this limits the products you can pin, it does streamline the buying process by linking directly to the Amazon product page. This also addresses—to some extent—the common problem Pinterest has of having items pinned that are no longer available for purchase.

The creation of this app by Brad Mahler and Mark Tholking shows a growing trend towards integrating online and offline shopping experiences. While multi-channel shopping has been embraced by more and more retailers, now there is a need for omni-channel shopping solutions, where buyers aren’t limited to using one interface at a time. Lovelist illustrates one aspect of how this need can be met: a shopper can use the mobile app to scan an item in a brick-and-mortar store, and then follow up online by either buying it through Amazon, or price checking and going back to that store or another to buy it in person.

LoveList is currently in the App Store for $0.99, which isn’t much for a way to streamline the Pinterest pinning process and make wishlists easier to create and share. It’s a nice little app to have, at least until Pinterest adds a barcode scanner to their own app.

Written by Kristin Clay

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