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Frequently Asked Questions
Have questions about how SmartList works, how we calculate savings, or how to use receipt scanning? Find fast, detailed answers below.
SmartList is an intelligent, offline-first Progressive Web App (PWA) designed to organize your grocery shopping lists and find the absolute best deals. By typing simple items (e.g. "Milk", "Strawberries") or scanning a receipt, the app automatically queries a comprehensive supermarket database to show you where the cheapest and most expensive grocery baskets lie, unlocking substantial weekly savings.
Our system accesses a curated database containing product lists and price information across leading UK supermarkets (such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Aldi). When you add an item, we use clean name-tokenization and alias mapping (e.g. matching "mlk" or "semi skim" to "milk") to find genuine product matches, and automatically filter the results to display the lowest and highest price options.
Yes! SmartList is built offline-first as an installable Progressive Web App. All your active shopping lists and comparative calculations are safely stored inside your browser's local database (IndexedDB). This ensures you can access, edit, and check off items directly on the supermarket floor even with zero cellular reception.
Simply navigate to the "Scan" tab. You can take a photo of your paper grocery receipt or upload one from your library. For best accuracy, fold the receipt before the final total/payment lines, ensure the supermarket brand at the top is clearly visible, and upload. Our secure parsing pipeline will read the items, match them to our catalog, and simulate the ingestion of lists seamlessly!
Absolutely. We stand by our Privacy Guarantee: your lists never leave your device. SmartList does not use centralized accounts, login passwords, or persistent remote tracking databases for list storage. All list data resides in your browser's private state, making it highly secure and fully in your control.
To install SmartList, simply click the "Add to Home Screen" action button at the top header of our website (or look for the install prompt in your browser's address bar). On mobile Safari, click the share icon and select "Add to Home Screen". On Chrome, tap the menu and select "Install App". This allows SmartList to launch as a standalone fullscreen application.
Yes, SmartList is 100% free! Our mission is to democratize smart shopping and help households save money on groceries. We display minimal, non-intrusive advertisements via Google AdSense to cover server infrastructure and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing costs.
Still have questions?
We are here to help. Reach out to the team via the developer portal at any time.