

Show HN: Buy Gifts by Describing the Giftee - ohashi

http://www.GiftLizard.com<p>Core idea: Describe the person you're trying to buy gifts for and it matches gifts based on those descriptions.<p>How it works: items are tagged in many categories from descriptive, relationships (dad), jobs, hobbies, interests, personalities, places (garden).  Items that match any tag show up, the more tags an item matches, the higher up it shows.<p>Some notes:<p>Products are hand selected and manually added to the site.  The goal is interesting gifts and gift discovery.  If you know exactly what you want to buy, the traditional hierarchical search works just fine.<p>There are only 150-200 Items in the database right now and 300-400 tags, I am adding more as fast as I can, the women's (mom, girlfriend, women, girls) selection is a bit thin (if anyone has some ideas especially in this category let me know!)<p>Any and all feedback would be appreciated!
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jrworksts
Awesome idea man and I really dig what you have going so far. Inputting items
by hand will def be an issues as there are millions of products out there. Do
you think you could try to work with the Amazon Associates API and input gifts
that way? I haven't really tried doing this before but you could possibly
attempt to utilize that (or something similar).

As far as the UI goes I think it looks fairly clean. For me it's a personal
preference to have all of the field top oriented and place the search results
on the bottom (google esque). This also would allow you to have rows of 3
instead of rows of 2 as far as products go.

Just my 2 cents great work man!

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ohashi
Thanks! I do use the amazon API (all products right now are on amazon) to
backfill a lot of the info. I don't want to just 'dump' tons of items though
because there are a lot of dupes. I looked at grabbing best sellers from each
category as a means of seeding, but there is a ton of dupes (like all the
different kindle versions). Tagging also became somewhat of an issue and most
items have few-no tags. Also the description quality/length varies greatly.

Thanks for the UI suggestion, I will play with that idea and see if I can come
up with a better top oriented/organized search/nav. I definitely would like
more screen real estate for gifts.

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tangentcity
"Buy Gifts by Describing the Giftee, the Gifter, the Gift, or the Activity"
seems more like it. I didn't find anything to buy today, but I added an item I
would like myself (a super-expensive cookbook), and had fun adding any tag
that came to mind relating to myself(gourmet, cook, etc), the book (luxurious,
exhaustive etc), or my desire for it (insane, unreasonable, etc).

Right now the products are all your choice - it's not that you have bad taste
or good taste, you just need more, and more tags. How are you going to scale
this? What about involving crowd-curation - inviting people shopping for
someone else to first choose something THEY want on Amazon, and input that
into GiftLizard with a cloud of tags that covers the nexus of object, desire,
and person. That might help increase the range of your offerings in a hurry. I
don't think that you would have added that particular book - which would make
a perfect gift for me if my wife happened to be directed to this site -
anytime soon.

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ohashi
I added your book, thanks for submitting it :)

As I said, the inventory isn't that big, but it will only get better with a
larger inventory. Scaling is the challenge. The other problem is maintaining
quality and not turning it into a boring gift shopping site.

My current approach to scaling is finding people from different backgrounds
and interests to add and tag gifts. I've got two people helping me right now
to try and increase the inventory size.

Thanks for the gift suggestion and feedback :)

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lcm133
Images often appears stretched because they have the wrong aspect ratio.

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ohashi
Thanks! I guess I need to add aspect ratio maintenance in the image resizer.

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showerst
Really minor UI things -

How about making the price slider 'snap' to $10 increments? I couldn't
intuitively get it to $150 (kept going 147 or 153) which was a tad annoying.
Maybe start it at a lower number too, so there's no chance of a user seeing a
page full of $1000 gifts and being turned off.

The site's a little generic, your domain screams for a good logo/mascot.

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ohashi
I'll look at seeing if I can modify the slider to snap at nicer increments.
It's just using jqueryUI slider, probably easier with a smaller range anyways.

I considered putting the mascot in the header but when I made it smaller, it
just didn't work well. He's on the about page.

Thank you for the feedback :)

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markhall
I think it is a great idea and I love the way it works. I look forward to you
expanding the database. I am the worst gift-giver in the world and a site like
this definitely gives me ideas through simple tags that I can classify the
recipient by. Keep up the great work!

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ohashi
Thanks :) Added another 50+ items yesterday, slowly but surely adding more. If
you notice an area is lacking please let me know. I was testing it yesterday
on some people and it definitely didn't satisfy some people but it gave me
suggestions about what tags I needed to add.

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nsoldiac
After entering the tag in the search box (or pick it from the auto-complete) I
intuitively press enter to add it to the filter, but that doesn't do anything.
Maybe that's the way it's supposed to work, but it'd be nice if hitting enter
worked too.

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ohashi
Oh wow, not sure how I missed that bug. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll get
that fixed.

update: fixed.

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nsoldiac
Now it works. Much better :)

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ohashi
<http://www.giftlizard.com> clickable

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mapster
I remember seeing an online store that offered me and my FB friends gifts
based on our FB wall info. I was surprised to see quite a few gifts that were
right up my alley, so to speak. So that is an option.

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ohashi
Any idea where their gift suggestions were coming from?

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mapster
Etsy has one: <http://www.etsy.com/gifts>

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ohashi
neat. etsy is on a shortlist of places to add new items from, need to explore
their API.

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mapster
I am working on an app for their API, but it doesn't appear yet that Etsy has
an affiliate program such as ebay or amazon.

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ohashi
Yeah, that is one reason they weren't the first source.

