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…
About the points kyriakos said, :
-reward system and ratings. We can introduce a reward system for users who provide valid and useful offers, so that someone with good feedback (trusted) can get some more advantages (eg better offers or free items from selected shops )
-offers. Specify if the offers are for new items or just old stock. There are many people that interested only in new items.
And some of my ideas:
– make something like contests for users. For example send a message to all users that the first 10 people who will get first to a specific shop, get free ice cream ( 😛 ) or a super offer !
– see where your friends have been. So you can track their shopping moves!
– rankings. If a user visits one time a shop gets a point. For every shop their is the King Shopster of it, which is the user with the most points for that specific shop. This is a way to make the app more fun for the users!
Those ideas seem so brilliant to me..
I’d like to mention that if we add premium users it would be better to remove advertisement and provide more features like filter options, map directions, reward points as paris and kyriacos discussed before.
Reward points can be collected each time a free user recommends an item and provide further information…
Each user must have a level of availability. In fact, if a user gets more “likes” or “positive feedbacks” which means that the user is a confident person. Obviously these feedbacks must be analogous to their comments and calculate a percentage of confidentiality.
Shop owners can make subscriptions and thus will help them to present their products first in the list searched by the users…
All mentioned above sounds good. I will like to add to Paris idea about tracking our friends shopping moves that we can do this by indicate which offers was added by our friends in the GPS locator (maybe have a different color on shops that were proposed by friends).
Regarding to GPS, i think that it will be better to be open for all users and not only for premium users because it will be useful for all users and our application will spread more easier with this feature.
For rewards, it might be good to create nickname for users or categories of users, like beginner and so on. For each category we can provide some offers to our users like 5% for first category, 10% for second category and so on. Moreover, we can reward users with some free stuff.
Furthermore, we can create group of interests where the users can chat and also may advertise some offers. This groups might be about laptops, cell phones, hard disks….
* The application can work with other related third party social networking applications which assist in shopping. For example: allow the users to view the product information in productwiki or see the product
reviews in blippy.com.
* we can use other similar services providing offers, Groupon for example which provides best deals according to location.
* personalised offers – users might want to view only a personalised set of offers which he can customize by changing the filter criterion(for example:- choose to see offers related to only dresses).
* We should decide on whether the application provides offer information in a map view like google map or in an inbox.
If it is a mapview then apart from the ability to search for offers relating to specific category of products, the application should by default provide multiple views with each view for each product category(one for electronic items, one for apparels and dresses). Otherwise the map will be cluttered with all the offers from all the shopping malls.
* enable users to subscribe to offers from a selected shop.
* Provide information as to which offer is the latest (by colour code or something).
* As Kyriakos suggested, rather than the user always giving the input,
there can be a feature where if the gps is kept
on, then the app can suggest best offers
according to the location of the user.
* I like the idea suggested by Paris – about
tracking our friend’s shopping moves. So if your
friend has followed an offer and shopped items, then highlight that
information in that offer visualization(colour
code or something).