Social shopping evolves with Plurchase
Saturday, October 10, 2009 1:19
I was reading today on TechCrunch about the launch of Plurchase, a social shopping application that lets you share your online shopping experience with your friends.
The concept is not new but Plurchase does a good job integrating its tool in the shops with zero cost of implementation for the shop owner.
Right now, Plurchase only supports Zappos, Amazon and Craigslist but they say that more shops will be integrated soon.
How does Plurchase work?
They’re using a custom proxy server that gets all the requests from the shop, including javascript and flash requests, proxyfi the requests and then send them back to the browser after they insert their own code (a custom sidebar).
You can interact with your friends using the Plurchase sidebar or by using integration with FaceBook (links of products that you share on the sidebar are posted to your facebook account too).
What do I think they’re doing wrong
The biggest advantage of this solution is that there is no effort required from the shop owner to integrate something on their platform but I have the feeling they could’ve gone that extra mile to have an excellent product.
That extra mile would be the unification of online and offline shopping experience with the use of mobile web.
Why restrict the user to online shops and not let him to share with his friends his offline shopping experiences?
How could they do that? By building an application for mobile devices that lets users post products they see offline, ask for opinions from their friends and receive feedback.
Also, as I see right now, the only way to interact with your friends is by inviting them to your shopping session. I would like to define for me a list of Plurchase friends or even use my friends list from FaceBook and see who’s online while I do shopping.
Anyway, Plurchase looks like an interesting project that we should keep an eye on.
