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Show HN: Shoplove - A women's high street store aggregator

22 points by Jim_Neath ↗ HN
Background: I noticed that my better half spent a lot of time searching for the same thing (at the time it was maternity dresses) across a whole load of women's fashion stores online. So I built her a site that lets her search some of the top stores from one site.

I have an idea for a few social elements that I want to add to try and make more of a community.

Any feedback, tips etc welcome.

http://shoplove.co.uk

21 comments

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ddagradi
Great job keeping the design classy and out of the way. Seems simple and easy to use - hope you have a ton of success with it.

Any idea on how to keep it alive/monetize it? Maybe high street stores would want to promote some of their items to the top of lists?

Jim_Neath
At the moment, I'm aiming at affiliate sales. I'm open to other solutions though :)
mofle
Why not for men too?
Jim_Neath
I am planning on expanding to men and kids later on. I just thought I'd keep it simple by targeting one section to begin with.
follower
What has been her response to the site?
Jim_Neath
Well she's pregnant again so she's finding it useful :D
bobds
Do all the shops you've included provide a datafeed for affiliates?
Jim_Neath
I've written crawler for all of the sites featured. Probably not the best/easiest way to do it but it works for me.
sramam
The filter by color works really well!

Especially since you mention crawling stores, would be interesting to know how the color-matching works. I'd think the metadata is not very consistent.

iamben
Great idea ;-)

I'd also love an explanation as what you're doing on the crawl to collate it all?

Jim_Neath
I originally tried analysing the colours in the images and picking out the most common colours used.

In the end, I just ended up using the colours mentioned on the pages when I scrape them.

It works well generally but throws a few false positives.

michaelpinto
I'm coming at this from a marketing point of view but the site feels very generic — more discount bin than "high street". Why not go back to your original concept and create an aggregator that's just focused on maternity (which is a valuable SEO play)? Also I'd design several looks and do some A/B testing (including selection of clothing for the front page which is critical).
wolfhumble
Well put together.

Just wondering: Do you have any concerns regarding copyright use of text, images etc. of the products being sold?

Have you looked into possible Google penalties regarding duplication of text from other websites?

Jim_Neath
Honestly, no I haven't looked into any of this.

I have noticed, however, that most, if not all of the sites offer product feeds that include the images. So I'd assume that there is no issue there.

Regarding Google, I honestly don't have a clue. I shall put some time into looking into it though

gohat
I'd figure out how to make it look higher end. It's nice, but it feels like a low-end site, imo. See http://www.saksfifthavenue.com for how a high end clothing store looks. Good luck!
sktrdie
Actually his design feels higher end than that saks-fifth-avanue website.
sktrdie
What's the technology behind the site? Great design as well... how did you get to be a coder and a designer at the same time?
Jim_Neath
Alas I'm still 90% coder, 10% designer. The current site is the third iteration of the layout.

If I wasn't too stingy to pay a designer, I would :)

sktrdie
So how do you scrape the sites and how do you store the data?