Support
Help with Cartworth
Get in touch
There is no account system and no ticket portal. Email is the way in, and it reaches a person.
- Response time
- Within two business days
To get a useful answer on the first reply, include:
- Your ZIP code, or at least your city and state.
- The store and the exact item.
- What Cartworth showed, and what you actually saw or expected.
- Whether you are on the iPhone app or the website, and the app version if it is the app (Settings, at the bottom).
- A screenshot, if you have one.
Please do not send screenshots that contain your home address or anything else personal. We do not need it and would rather not have it.
Why is a store missing?
Cartworth only shows a chain when it can confirm that chain actually has a store near you. It does that two ways: by checking which retailers publish a weekly circular for your postal code, and by asking each candidate chain's own website whether it has a store serving your area. If neither answers, the chain is left out rather than listed and then found to be empty.
So a store can be missing for any of these reasons, in rough order of likelihood:
- It is outside your search radius. On iPhone, raise it in Settings; the radius ranges from 5 to 40 miles and the default is deliberately tight. The web version has the same control, in Settings under "Your location".
- You have not selected it. Settings, Stores, shows everything found near you, including ones that are not currently switched on.
- Cartworth does not know that chain yet. Coverage is more than seventy national and regional chains, which is a lot but is nowhere near every grocer in America. Independents, co-ops and small regional chains are mostly not covered.
- The chain blocks automated price lookups. A few large chains do. Where that is the case Cartworth shows their weekly ad and says plainly that it has no prices for them, rather than pretending otherwise.
- The chain's site did not answer in time. Retailer sites go down and get slow. Try "Find stores again" in Settings, which re-runs the lookup without using the cached result.
If a chain near you is genuinely missing and is not one of the cases above, email us with your ZIP and the store name. Chain coverage is the most common request and it is the easiest kind of feedback to act on.
Why does this say "online price"?
Because that is the only price that retailer publishes, and telling you otherwise would be a lie by omission.
Retailers fall into two camps. Some publish the price you would pay standing in the aisle: Cartworth labels those shelf. Others publish only a delivery or pickup catalogue, and many of those retailers state themselves that the online price can run above the in-store price to cover the cost of the service. Cartworth labels those online.
Both numbers are real and both are useful. What would not be useful is blending them into one figure that is true of neither. When you are comparing, an online price is best read as an upper bound on that store's shelf price rather than as the shelf price itself.
A third label, weekly ad, means the number came from that store's own circular, along with whatever conditions the circular attaches to it.
The prices look wrong
Sometimes they are. Here is how to work out which kind of wrong you are looking at.
- Check the label on the price first. If it says "online", it is a delivery listing and it is expected to differ from the tag on the shelf. That is not an error, it is the label doing its job.
- Check that it is the same product. Sizes, varieties and store brands are easy to conflate. Open the product to see the size and the unit price breakdown.
- Check whether the price needs something. A weekly ad price may require a loyalty card, a clipped digital coupon or a minimum quantity. Cartworth shows the conditions where the circular states them, and shows what the item costs without the coupon.
- Refresh it. Results are cached for a short time so that repeating a search does not hammer the retailer. Pull to refresh in the app, or use the refresh control on the web, to force a fresh fetch.
- Check the shelf tag. A retailer can change a price at any moment, and its own website can lag behind its own registers. The tag in the store is the truth.
If, after all that, a price is still plainly wrong, please tell us. Include the store, the item, the price Cartworth showed, the price you saw, and the date. Genuinely wrong prices usually mean either the retailer is publishing something incorrect or Cartworth is matching the wrong product, and both are worth fixing.
Cartworth is a guide, not a guarantee. That is in the terms, and it is meant literally.
How do I cancel a subscription?
Cartworth Pro is billed by Apple, so cancelling happens in your Apple Account settings, not in the app. We cannot cancel it for you, and no one who can is reachable through us.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Tap your name at the top.
- Tap Subscriptions.
- Tap Cartworth Pro.
- Tap Cancel Subscription, and confirm.
A shortcut: in Cartworth, Settings, Cartworth Pro, tap "Manage subscription". It opens the same page.
Cancelling stops the next renewal. It does not end the period you already paid for: Pro keeps working until that period runs out, and then the app returns to the free tier with your data intact. To avoid being charged again, cancel at least 24 hours before the renewal date.
If you bought Pro lifetime, there is nothing to cancel. It is a one-time purchase and never renews, which is why the app does not show a "Manage subscription" link for it.
Refunds
Refunds are Apple's to give, not ours. Go to reportaproblem.apple.com, sign in with your Apple Account, find the Cartworth purchase and request a refund. If Apple turns it down and you think that is unfair, email us and we will tell you honestly what we can and cannot do, which is usually not much.
More answers
I paid, but the app says I am on the free tier
Open Cartworth, go to Settings, and tap Restore purchases. That asks the App Store to re-check what the Apple Account signed in on this device has bought. The same button is on the Pro screen.
If that does not work, check that the device is signed in with the same Apple Account you bought with. A purchase belongs to an Apple Account, not to a phone. If you bought it on a family member's account, Family Sharing needs to be on for the purchase to reach you.
The Pro screen says subscriptions are not available right now
That message means the app could not reach the App Store to load prices. Check your connection, make sure the device is signed in to an Apple Account, and try again in a minute. It is not a payment failure and nothing has been charged.
Why does a search take so long, and why did one store come back empty?
Because nothing is pre-computed. Every search goes out to several retailer websites at once, live, and waits for them. A first search in a new area can take anything from a few seconds to about a minute. Repeat searches are much faster because results are cached briefly.
A store coming back empty usually means its site was slow or down at that moment, or that it genuinely has no matching product. Cartworth would rather show you an empty row with a reason than invent a price.
How do I change my ZIP code or the search radius?
In the iPhone app: Settings, "Where you shop". Type a new five digit ZIP and tap Update, or tap the location arrow to use your current location. The search radius is right below, from 5 to 40 miles.
Changing your ZIP rebuilds the list of stores near you, so expect the store selection to change with it.
On the web, the ZIP is in the settings section of the app.
A search returned something that is not what I asked for
Cartworth tries hard to only count real matches, so that milk chocolate never wins a search for milk. It is not perfect. Being more specific helps a lot: "whole milk 1 gal" beats "milk", and "boneless chicken thighs" beats "chicken".
Adding a size is worth doing anyway, because it lets Cartworth price that exact amount rather than whatever package it happened to find.
Why does a unit price say "est."?
Because the store listed that item by the piece and did not publish a weight. To give you a per pound figure at all, a typical weight for that kind of item has to be assumed. Cartworth marks the result as an estimate rather than passing an assumption off as a measurement. Treat those numbers as a rough guide.
My price alerts are not arriving
Four things to check, in order:
- Alerts are a Pro feature. Confirm Pro is active in Settings.
- "Price and sale alerts" is switched on in Cartworth's Settings.
- Notifications are allowed for Cartworth in the iPhone Settings app.
- Background App Refresh is on for Cartworth, and Low Power Mode is off.
Alerts are generated on your phone during background refreshes that iOS schedules when it sees fit. They are not instant push messages from a server, because there is no server. In practice that means an alert can arrive some hours after a price changes rather than the moment it does.
How do I delete my data?
In the iPhone app, Settings has "Clear cached prices" and "Delete price history". Deleting the app removes everything it stored: your list, watches, favorites, settings and history. There is no account, so there is nothing held elsewhere to request the deletion of. The full picture is in the privacy policy.
What exactly is free?
The website is free, with no account and no search limit: full comparison, weekly ads, watches (up to 60), history and trip planning.
The iPhone app's free tier is three searches a day and one price watch, plus this week's ads, store discovery and your shopping list. Cartworth Pro lifts the limits and adds alerts, favorite brand alerts, recipe import, trip planning, price history and next week's ads.
Is there an Android version?
Not at the moment. The website works in any mobile browser and does the full comparison, so Android users are not locked out of the core of it.
I have a feature request or found a bug
Send it by email. Bug reports that include the ZIP, the store, the item and what you expected get fixed faster, because they can be reproduced. Chain coverage requests should say which chain and which ZIP.
See also: privacy policy and terms of use.