An important feature of our application would be the ability to create groups and friendships between the users. Any user will be able to add someone as his/her friend and this should of course require the other part’s acceptance (just like it’s done in Facebook for example). When two users become friends, they will be able to exchange messages perhaps and also rate each other’s shopping preferences in order to build a sort of relativity between them (could later be used for recommendation algorithms, etc).
In addition, friends will then be able to create shopping groups (or just message threads) and this will enable them to share offers and discounts between them, therefore keeping stuff private. This might be useful when an offer is limited for example or the product’s price might increase if many people learn about it. These groups will of course be kept private and any offer and discount posted between friends will not be made publicly available.