As a follow-up to Blake Stimac’s “Essential Android apps for the holiday shopping season” article posted earlier today, it’s time now to take a look at some of the best choices available for iOS, including iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. As more and more people continue to use their mobile phones to get holiday shopping done, we feel it’s pretty important that you make the most of the experience by having the best apps to get the entire job done, be it creating a list of gifts for friends and family to tracking the packages to see when they will arrive at your doorstep. The following apps have you covered.
Gift Lists
Keeping track of everyone you need to buy gifts for is a pain in the ass, it really is. Thankfully, there are great smartphone apps available that can help you ease the stress and not worry about whether you forgot someone or what they wanted.
One of those great smartphone apps is Gift Plan. It has a phenomenal design and is feature-packed with everything you need to plan for the holiday shopping season. You can browse your gift plans by ideas, likes, sizes, or what you already bought, add in pictures of gifts, and view all of your events and people collectively. That means the $2.99 you spend on this iPhone app will still be worth it six months from now, since the app is intended to help you plan out gifts for every occasion possible, rather than the holiday season alone.
Download: Gift Plan for $2.99
Shopping
You finally figured out all of your gift plans. Great. Now it’s time to whip out your wallet and start spending heaps upon heaps of your hard-earned money. Rather than just sticking to one recommendation, quite a few online and retail stores have their own iPhone (and some iPad) apps, so you’ll find download links to some of the top picks below. As a side note, my personal favorite is TheFind because it allows you to search across multiple websites and stores for a product to get the best price.
Download:
TheFind (iPhone)
Amazon (iPhone and iPad)
eBay for iPhone | eBay for iPad
Target for iPhone | Target for iPad
Walmart for iPhone | Walmart for iPad
Best Buy (iPhone)
Package Tracking
The gifts were planned and purchased. The final step is waiting for all of it to arrive. Plenty of apps offer package tracking capabilities, but there’s probably no better one than Posted.
Posted is an app for both iPhone and iPad that allows you to track just about any package you’ve ordered. It supports over 150 international carriers, push notifications, barcode scanning, and will keep your account in sync across multiple devices. The developers chopped 50 percent from the original price for the holiday season, so you can grab it in the iOS App Store for just $0.99, which I think is a great buy.
Download: Posted for $0.99
Wrap-Up
Now that you’ve seen my top iOS picks for the holiday shopping season, it’s your turn. Be sure to leave any app suggestions in the comments section below or write your opinions on the ones mentioned above. Happy shopping!