Shopster – A Social Mobile App

One of the essential features of the Shopster application is to let the users post new offers and discounts and share it with other users.

For example, if an ordinary user comes across a new discount or offers in a particular shop, and decides to share it with other users (or a specific group of users), he can easily do that using this application. The application provides the GUI to input the relevant information (location, expiry date of offer, visibility of the post etc) and with one click the information will be available for other users to view!

A different scenario is when a shop owner decides to post the offers and discounts related to his shop with profit motive. He can use the application similarly and post the information and share it with other users (Here the post will be mostly public).

Registered users of Shopster will be able to submit their comments on the offers posted (apart from rating them). This way they will have the chance to express their opinions and say whether an offer is worthy for example, or maybe say if there is a catch for obtaining a specific offer, or even give some details about the technical specificiations of a product. However, these comments should also have some kind of evaluation and undergo criticism from the rest of the users reading them. Therefore, we have decided to include a rating for every comment and other users will be able to say if that comment is helpful or not. These ratings will then be weighted and will reflect to the user’s overall rating. So if for example a user’s overall rating is quite low and a new Shopster user sees a comment from that user, he/she will know that the specific user is not very trustworthy and that the comment is probably not accurate.

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.

Another feature of our application would be a subscription to a shop you like and also find out the best shops with the best rating. Each shop in the application it will be considered as a different item but also as a parent of the offers that are published for them. As a result, each user can subscribe on a shop and the application will inform him about new offers via email or by presenting the latest offers about shops that was subscribed on the home page (after the user was logged in). Furthermore, each user will have the opportunity to express his preference about a shop by liking the shop (same as liking a post in facebook or youtube). As a consequence, the user should be able to see which are the “best” shops, according to the numbers of like made by other users.

GPS Tracking is one of the most usable today’s features in mobile phones used by millions of people. According to our project, users will be able to see where the stores are located and how they can get there containing meaningful directions by car or walking. Tracking services will be achieved via Google Maps because they offer several and helpful information about the location of places. Specifically, every offer is associated with its store so user will be able to get directions using the GPS tracking operation thus finding directions on how to visit the shop from a specified location. Additionally, when the user watches a particular offer or discount then all nearby shops will be appeared on the screen allowing user to visit these ones as well especially when he/she is at that region.

I am creating this post to keep a record of what features we can include in the app, as we discussed the earlier days. Comment on this post for your own ideas instead of creating new posts (I believe it’s better in order to have everything gathered here, in one place).

– GPS tracking and finding shops (with offers) nearby

– Ability to filter searches and display shops based on what city they are located, what products they sell, perhaps what types of discounts are offered, etc.

– Offer/discounts must have an expiry date (e.g. offer valid until ….)

– User registration of course is important. We said that it might be good to allow login from existing social networks (facebook, twitter) as well as new users registration.

– Thoughts on premium users(shopsters?). Maybe if a user pays to become a premium user, he/she can then have the ability to use GPS tracking or maybe filter results, while free users won’t have these abilities? What are your thoughts?

– Make a different category of users for validated shop owners.

– Reward system?

– User trust? User ratings on the discounts/offers they publish as well as general user rating/trust?

– Also include ratings for specific discounts/offers? Perhaps an offer is not very interesting or you are not actually saving much money…

Please comment in order to expand this list…