I was searching for some information about my camera, when I came across to http://www.testfreaks.co.uk/. It is similar to ProductWiki that Raj reviewed below, but where people are also rating items that they own or just they have tested. You can find ratings for almost every electronic item you want to buy, from cameras to microwaves. They include numerous categories and each category has its own specifications for rating. All items have a global “Freak Score” which is the overall score of the item out of 10. You can also find some other useful information about the items, as were to buy it and its price.
We can include a similar but more simple feature to Shopster. Users will be able to rate items they own. The user would be able to write his experiences with the item and put a mark to some categories. These categories could be some global ones as value for money, build quality, performance or something similar, ease of use and an overall score. We can then add a product search to the application and the results will show shops with the selected items and of course its overall score.
That’s sound good to me. But i think we have to be very careful about how this rating will affect our customers because the original idea was to present sales about products and this additional feature may change this original idea. So i think this feature will be better to be proposed as an future feature of our application and should not be included in our prototype.
Fair enough! Another idea is to make this feature available only to members who have purchased the full version of it and not the free one! Something like an advance feature!
Bright idea but it will make our project more complex because we have to district users… I agree with Marios that it could be a future specification 🙂
I agree with Paris that there should be a feature that lets users attach details to an OFFER (only if they want to) like comments(their experience following the offer), the item they bought(model no or something) plus their rating.
But I guess giving global values (value for money etc) to PRODUCTS will make the application complex and we will be diverting from our “offer centric” application.
But I think another idea could be to shift the global value idea suggested by Paris from products to offers. The global variables like value for money, how much money I saved by following a particular offer, quality of the purchase we made on discount etc. could be attached to offers.
This information in addition to the item information(model no, shopping experience) could then be used to have an offer search.
For example, I can input the item category that I want to buy (laptop) and then it would give me the top offers (ordered according to global values attached to offers) by shops which include laptops.