02 HOW SHOPBUY INNOVATES

ShopBuy was achieved by working with retailers, and merging third party tools that create a cohesive experience for the customer that just makes sense. The first step in creating this end-to-end shopping experience was to create a web-based platform with a common data or product format between all retailers, merging and mapping their data fields to our common product format, which included the characteristics users cared about most: product names, images, sizes, colors, patterns, ect. A major issue quickly became obvious: not all metadata from every retailer was created equally and categorizing product types in a consistent manner was problematic. In-fact some retailers would provide an immense amount of data while other would provide only a picture and a few words on the product.

 

The next step was defining what’s going to keep users coming back. The goal of ShopBuy is to build a better shopping experience, but adding some social elements helped to keep user interest. In fact, ShopBuy may have seemed at the surface, social in nature. This was done by design to give the customers the feeling of a Facebook or Instagram style feed and experience: familiar, media-rich, and informative. The catch here is instead of focusing on user generated data, ShopBuy presents data to user that was sourced directly from retail channels. This seemed to work to some extent, but user retention could be better. Because of the skew to focus more on products than social aspects, there needed to be a way to drive users back to the application without building a full social experience, like Pinterest. To do this, a g gamification system was created that encourages user interaction and keep engagement high. We’ll talk more on the gamification later. The last, but most important, was keeping existing retailers happy, while creating a process to onboard new retailers very quickly.