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The seven best apps for holiday shopping

These free mobile apps can help you find deals, manage your shopping list or even locate your car in a crowded parking lot.

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Manu Fernandez/AP/File
A Samsung Galaxy S5 is demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Apps can help smart consumers make holiday shopping more manageable. But with so many to choose from, how can you pick the best?

Here’s a list of our favorite shopping apps. These mobile tools — which are free to download — can help you find deals, manage your shopping list or even locate your car in a crowded parking lot.

ShopSavvy

ShopSavvy helps you find the lowest price available on gift items. If you’re in a store, use the app to scan a product’s barcode, and ShopSavvy will locate the best deal locally or online. If the store offers price matching, show a salesperson your ShopSavvy research to request that lower price.

Download from iTunes or Google Play.

CouponCabin

CouponCabin is a coupon and cash-back app. Members can search for offers from more than 4,000 stores and brands, and earn up to 10% cash back on online purchases from more than 1,800 stores.

Download from iTunes or Google Play.

Retale

Retale is like flipping through a retailer circular without the paper. This location-based app presents weekly ads, coupons, store locations and more in an easy-to-navigate digital format. Users can also create shopping lists and set alerts for specific products.

Download from iTunes or Google Play.

Discount Calculator

Avoid sticker shock at the register with Discount Calculator, an ingenious app that figures the real prices for all of your items, including store discounts and applicable sales taxes. The Discount Calculator apps for Apple and Android devices are made by different companies, but both have easy-to-use interfaces and positive user reviews.

Download from iTunes or Google Play.

Santa’s Bag

If you want to be organized and stick to your holiday budget, use Santa’s Bag to combine a shopping list, budget tracker and Christmas countdown clock. The app is only for iOS users, but there’s a similar app for Android users below.

Download from iTunes.

Christmas Gift List

Android users can manage their shopping list and budget with a fun, holiday-themed interface using the Christmas Gift List app. It’ll help keep you on track, especially if you’re like the 42% of respondents from a survey in NerdWallet’s Consumer Holiday Shopping Report who didn’t stick to their 2015 holiday budgets. The app also lets you set reminders for things — for example, to set aside time to wrap your gifts.

Download from Google Play.

Find My Car

Find My Car can be useful to help figure out where you parked in a gigantic shopping center lot. The app shows the GPS location of your car. The iOS and Android apps are made by different companies, but they share the same name and they work well, reviewers say.

Download from iTunes or Google Play.

This article first appeared in NerdWallet. 

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