Post new offer

May 17th, 2011

Roger is 45 years old and is a shop owner of a small shop that sells clothes at Southampton. Roger after paying membership for Shopster application. he decides to post his first offer in the application.

Roger starts the application and enters his username and password for log in. After Roger is logged in, the Home page is loaded. Roger clicks on the offers and is navigated to the Offers page. Roger clicks on the create offer button for creating a new offer and post it. Roger is navigated to the new offer screen, and there fill in information like a title for the offer, a description, the shop related to the offer, the discount, starting date and ending date. After filling up the form with the details Roger posts the offer.

UML Use Case

Use case for Post new offer

Post new offer use case

User Interface Storyboard

Logged in to Shopster

View Offers

Create a new offer


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Design of Mockups

May 17th, 2011

Above you can see the mockups of our application as well as a simple navigation diagram. If you want to see a screen in more detail you can click to the links below.

  1. Login Screen
  2. Home Screen
  3. Register Screen
  4. Profile Screen
  5. Offers Screen
  6. Search Screen
  7. Nearby Shops
  8. Offers by Shop
  9. Friends Screen
  10. Groups Screen
  11. Subscriptions Screen
  12. View Offer Screen
  13. Add New Offer Screen
  14. Offers Results Screen
  15. Shop Screen
  16. User Comment Screen
  17. Map Screen
  18. Shop Photos Screen
  19. Submit Comment Screen

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Best Buy Open Products API

April 22nd, 2011

The api set provides a REST based interface for Best Buy retailers entire product catalog which is updated regularly and access to information like pricing, availability, specifications, descriptions and images for nearly a million current and historical products.

Products can be searched using some 70 different product attributes like: productid, name, type, sku id, regular price etc. There is a search function using keyword which is in beta state.

It also has a bias function where the user can specify how important or unimportant a particular search attribute is to him/her by attaching certain weight to the search results.

The api can also be used to search the availability of stores within the specified distance with a particular product in stock. It also includes Napster’s product catalog.

Another important feature which can be used by Shopster is the review api which allows retrieval of review information like reviewer, rating, date submitted, and review commentary.

Disadvantages:
* only access to best buy company info- not necessarily a disadvantage.
* popular only in US.

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Amazon – product advertising api

April 22nd, 2011

Amazon provides product advertising api for users to advertise amazon products. It provides details like items for sale, customer reviews, seller reviews, as well as most of the functionality that we see on www.amazon.com, such as finding items, finding similar items, displaying customer reviews, and product promotions.

The api is free.

The function (itemsearch) takes a range of parameters to specify the customers requirements to view a set of items. The api provides access to the Amazon database which is called catalog. The results can be narrowed down by specifying search indices(eg:- to narrow the search results to just books category).

The search results are returned in XML format.

Using the service requires the user to register for an AWS access ID.The web service supports both REST & SOAP request. It supports languages like: JAVA, C#, PERL, PHP.

The Amazon api provides customer reviews as part of their api which could be integrated into Shopster so that the users can view reviews for their selected products. Reviews hosted by a trusted host like Amazon will add value to the application.

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Database Diagram

April 20th, 2011
Database Diagram

Database Diagram

Rewards and RateFriendPerCategory tables pending, waiting for decision

Posted in Design and Development | 1 Comment »

Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls

April 16th, 2011

The author of this paper focuses on how people react with Personalised Advertising in regards to the level of Privacy control they have in a social network. For the needs of this study data from a randomised field experiment to optimised advertising campaigns on Facebook is used. In the middle of the experiment, Facebook improved their privacy policy. Even though Facebook did not chang the way advertisers targeted and personalised ads, users were twice as likely to click on personalised advertisments.

This paper can help us understand that Shopster has to be concerned about privacy issues. It is a crucial issue how we are going to keep private data safe from other users. We can see from this study that even the effectiveness of personalised advertising is directly related to the privacy controls that each user will have in the application.

Reference : Tucker, Catherine. Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2011.

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ProductWiki api & Widget

March 27th, 2011

Since Shopster application provides information related to product offers, it is useful to provide other shopping-related features that users will find helpful. There are numerous such services which provide their functionality through free apis. One such service is ProductWiki.

ProductWiki provides api support for accessing product information in their databases. The api provides two kinds of queries; one for a specific product (for eg:- iphone) using the productid and one for a general search of the product. It supports product search using different identifiers such as Amazon Standard Identification Number, Universal Product Code, European Article Number, Manufacturer Part Number and ProductWiki-specific productid. The api provides two return types: xml and json. User registration is required to get the api key.

The result of the api query is the information provided in the productwiki page of the corresponding product like: images, key features, pros and cons, reviews, related products from competitors, tags etc.
link: http://connect.productwiki.com/connect-api/

ProductWiki also provides a ready-made widget: “ProductWiki connect” that can be integrated into a website. In contrast to the api which provides an interface for accessing the data, the widget is used  for accessing the ProductWiki specific features like product voting. pulling data from networking websites.

link: http://connect.productwiki.com/connect-details/

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Navigation Diagram of Shopster

March 26th, 2011
Navigation Diagram

Navigation Diagram

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Recommendation System

March 24th, 2011

Recommendation system is one of the most important features of Shopster.  Recommendations will be proposed to a user when he is viewing an offer and when he is searching for . There are many types of recommendations that our system will recommend. Some of them are (lets assume that the reader is viewing an offer about a laptop):

  1. Offers about related products (e.g  the system will recommend offers about laptop cases, a mouse, etc. )
  2. Offers about similar products (e.g the system will recommend other offers about laptops)
  3. Other offers from the current shop
  4. Offers liked by other friends (offers that friends of the user have rated highly)

A more detailed analysis of the recommendation system and algorithms to be used can be found here.

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Users are able to rate offers

March 23rd, 2011

Every user will be able to rate the offers presented in our application. The combined rating from all offers of a user will be his/her rating, so other users will know if a he/she is a good/reliable one in order to trust him/her. The ratings will be out of 5. We can still make some simple categories to rate, like value for money or purchase happiness and then calculate the overall rating. This rating will show if an offer can be trusted or if is a good deal for other users. Furthermore with this rating system we will be able to rate each user who posts offers, making clear to other people who is a good/trusted user.

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