What would you like to see in a Shopping Search Engine?
A good friend of mine is doing some cool things with Shopping Search. A long conversation got me thinking, and I thought I'd share some of my ideas with you.
What do you want out of shopping online?
* RANK STORE / RANK PRODUCT -- Would love to have something like Reddit.com where I could vote products / offers / stores up or down and see same from my affinity group(s).
You know how TIVO has Thumbs Up/ Thumbs Down? Instead of a NEXT button, maybe make everyone click a rating button like AWESOME / ROCKS / OK / NO OPINION / NOT FOR ME / YUCK / TOTALLY SUCKS
* HAVE YOU SEEN THIS / SHOP VOYEUR -- Public views of what
someone else is buying / carting / saving (no personal info shown
*AND*opt in)
* SHOPPING AS THERAPY -- SOCIAL ASPECT -- (this'll get you on Oprah)
A good example is me shopping with my good buddy, Joe Morin. He calls this Metro Eye for the Redneck Guy. I guess I don't get out that much.
Anyway, I would love to have "conference call style" shopping where I can group shop with someone else anywhere else on the net and "push" products into an eBay like list (or Froogle Grid). Let members of the group vote up or down and product display sorted by grouprank, my rank, price, etc. Kind of like a Shopping Escalator of Products.
I would show how many people (in your group) have browsed this item, and show algo-suggested stores/ things to buy and display those results like one of my "shopping buddies" as far as the look of this interface.
* SHOP BY COLOR PALETTE -- Upload a JPEG of your room colors or of swatches from your wardrobe or choose a color palette (from a list) and a smart image reader matches colors of products to your colors. Istockphoto.com has something like this. I'm just looking for a blue shirt. Or a black leather jacket. Don't show me ANYTHING else!
* SHOP BY PROFILE -- Build a shopping profile based upon what you have bought before, or what you own (inventory), or from a profile built by answering 20 questions, or by what products you look at, or what you can afford, or where you live. PROFILE SHOPPER recommends furniture, clothes, electronics, etc.
* OH, YOU NEED A ___ -- Smart BUYER'S GUIDE. I'm in Mississippi and need a better winter coat and the SBG asks you a few questions about the different features of same and starts finding me coats. Style. Price. Brands. Weather. Size. Activities. Whatever.
* NEGATIVE MATCHING KEYWORD DICTIONARY -- Star WARS not Star TREK. No pleather or hemp. Or polyester!
* LOCAL SHOPPING ASPECT Make a WAP or SMARTPHONE version integrated
w/ live/ real shopping so when I'm in St. Louis and I'm looking for iPod cases it'll tell me where to go. Wonder if you could integrate
with Product finders/Store finders a la Best Buy or Radio Shack?
* FLIP THROUGH THE CATALOG -- I'd like a NEXT item "FASHION SHOW" thing where once I got a list of
pages / items I could sit in one place and ZIP through the product
pages one by one without having to navigate and dig around in Web sites. Maybe even have a RECAP
feature to show me all the products I looked at in descending order of what I looked at the longest or rated the highest ...
* NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY -- I would like to have a budgeting thing that totalled up my "things I'm thinking about buying today" so when I start totalling up furniture my eyes don't overextend my wallet.
* MY WISHLIST where I could mark stuff I'm interested in so friends and family could actually buy me stuff I wanted and it would actually suggest OTHER related items not on my list (but not stuff I marked I already owned).
* MY SHOPPING LIST matching feature where I could open shopping search queries to match certain purchases I need to make. For example, I could create a line item like "Trashy Novel for Post Dummies Book Beach Trip" and select product type:Book and select Subject:fun and ever so often this ShopBotThing would say, hey, how 'bout THIS book?
* ALWAYS LOOKING FOR NEW... Would like to have an eBay tool that cataloged my eBay queries and even a keyword dictionary that would ping me when something new came online (eBay or anything really) for "Infantino Star Wars Original Art" or Neil Gaimain (new release hardback) or whatever my queries were (sorted by popularity of serps: number of pages looked at FROM the query)
* MY NEW RELEASE engine -- Something that sifted through this week's new releases in DVDs, Books, Comics, etc. at my top 100 favorite stores and suggest things I should look at...
* MY GIFT SUGGESTION TOOL * Would like to have a gift suggestion tool where I create a wish list Nephew Birthday Present (Nov-13) and it suggests presents based upon other settings / interests / past purchases.
What do YOU want in a shopping search experience? -- Rob
