04.07.2011

The future of online social shopping?

Posted by Oscar Pettersson in Ooo, that looks nice

Svpply helps you find the products you love, from the people and stores you find interesting.

And yes the site does exactly this. Rather than overwhelm new users with a barrage of functionality, clever widgets or multiple navigational aids they have really focused on their objective: finding products from people/stores you find interesting.

To me this site is an evolution of something I and others been doing for years - a very visual browsing of design and fashion blogs using an RSS reader to find the latest interesting and well made products that others have stumbled upon. But the key addition in svpply is that all the products you browse can be bought! Yes there are other services that do something similar but this grabbed me because of its simplicity: Clean layout. Minimal functionality. Clear and focused search. Visual exploration via related products and users who like similar things.

But most importantly - the joy of stumbling upon little gems is made possible because you follow people with similar tastes and interests (judged by what they have in their product stream).

I hope they maintain the focus but invariably as they grow their product catalogue (and junk starts to annoyingly creep in) the model may break.

At the moment this is a great example of discovering new things to buy in a social way. However, to me this sits outside the borders of Facebook in terms of discovery as I chose who's taste I like - not what my supposed Facebook social graph deem to be of interest by 'Liking' things.

Oh... and if you are wondering what to get me for Christmas... here is my stream: http://svpply.com/oscarp

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