Loyalty cards have become a necessary evil.  If you don’t have one, you are probably missing out on some savings - especially at supermarkets and drug stores.  So like most of us, you end up attaching them to your key ring or stuffing them in your wallet only to fumble for them when you are at the checkout.

Well, two smartphone apps hope to change this experience for you: Cardstar and Key Ring.

Cardstar and Key Ring are loyalty card repositories. Loyalty cards can easily be entered on both apps. Loading your loyalty cards is very easy. You choose retailers from a list or if your retailer is not listed, you can manually add it. The Key Ring app has a built-in barcode scanner that captures the barcode using the camera function. Eight of the nine cards I own were accurately scanned and loaded into the app. Cardstar requires you to manually enter each loyalty card which took me 10 minutes or so.

In my testing of each of these apps, both of these apps work very well. However, I found Cardstar to be slightly better. Accessing the barcode of a loyalty card only required a single click (versus two clicks on Key Ring). Cardstar also had a lot more coupons and offers for my loyalty cards than Key Ring. Either way, both apps work well and simply the management of loyalty cards.

More importantly, these apps have a tremendous opportunity to become much more than that. Besides being very convenient, these apps could become very essential to shopping. A great feature from Key Ring is the ability to select a coupon from a retailer and have the savings automatically be applied at the checkout counter. Key Ring has initially signed up several dozen grocery stores and continue to expand into other categories. The next evolution of these apps involve the integration of LBS (Location-Based Services). By integrating LBS into these applications, retailers could send you a real-time offer or an on the spot promotion right in the store - maybe even narrowed down to a specific aisle.

What do you think? Is there a future for these products?