Besides this FAQ, also check out the intro guide under Menu-Information-Prices inside the app.
Under Settings, you can select between 3 types of price crowdsourcing
- No price crowdsourcing.
- Basic price crowdsourcing. The system, will prompt you for prices on commonly bought items, if you’ve not already filled them in. The system will also refill the price for an item if another user bought it at the same store. In effect, you participate in creating a shared grocery price database.
- Advanced price crowdsourcing. This mode is only intended for participants in grocery price surveys. It makes the app prompt you to enter not only price but also barcode for everything you buy.
There’s a blog post going into more detail about price crowdsourcing here: https://groshapp.com/grocery-prices/
Since that post, we have stepped up the detail level required before prices get shown to other users, as mentioned in the 2nd bullet below.
In general, there’s a big challenge with data quality when an app crowdsources information. Here’s a few steps we’ve taken in Grosh related to our crowdsourcing of grocery prices:
- If you do not turn on “price crowdsourcing”, the app assumes that you are not accurate in entering prices, so it does not archive them after the purchase. This is done in order not to pollute the system with inaccurate prices.
- In order to give the prices more value for other users, some variant information regarding the item must be stated.
So just bread 1EUR will not go into the price database, but if one level of detail was added e.g. brand, weight, or organic marking – then this means that the price enters the common price database.