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

[Jim_Neath]

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

[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).

[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 :)

[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.

[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

[Jim_Neath]

Clickable: http://shoplove.co.uk

[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.

[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.

[iamben]

Great idea ;-)

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

[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?

[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.

[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

[sktrdie]

Haha! Congrats :)