

Business idea: recommendation system for physical stores - cpinto
http://blog.celsopinto.com/post/5728926942/business-idea-recommendation-system-for-physical

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machupai
excellent Thought. Could I be the devils advocate for a second.

1) Most of the retail chains (I mean the Big/Medium one which are primary
target for this kind of system), already has a price check system installed in
their store. This can be issues in following way \- Why should the store waste
some space for new harware \- What is stopping these price checking sytem
vendors to simply upgrade their system with this feature as addional one. They
already have a installed base and customer confiedence, they can kill the
market if they see any traction.

So ideally you may want to create a single system which will replace this
price checking system with addional features. or the reverse.

2) Most of the Small shop owners any way wont have space for a price
checker/scanner. So this market is pretty limited.

3) There are few key advantages for online profile like amazon does. \- people
can browse at their liesure and no effort/little effort is required from their
side to do passive browsing. while nobody will visit a shop juzz to do passive
shopping of grocessories/pharmacy. \- Passive browsing helps to build one part
of the user profile. This is not possible in case of physical profiling. Also
there is some effort required from user to scan any item. \- For online
browsing, you can use IP address/user login details to track a user and hence
his profile which can help u display related products. But when u do this
physical, unless there is some way user enter his details (either scanning his
member card or entering some number), u cannot use his history during shopping
time. This will limit ur data to current shopping iteration only.

4) Already most of the groceorry shops provides coupons/deal details currently
during your billing time based on the items u have purchased. So this is not
new.

5) Now if these business are ready to share the details (which i dont think
they will do)and u are keeping the profile of each consumer/customer in a
centralized form, u will have more details during the checkout time. (due to
same reason that u wont know the user untill he provides his member card). And
that can be more usefull to provide more deals based on \- other shopping he
has done recently. e,g he bought a tv from best buy and he is in sears, offer
him deals on tv stand. \- See if u can utilize some social cues. either use
facebook or have ur own social features. so that u can tap his friends profile
to suggest something.

I am not saying these are big issues, but something u need to think before u
pursue these idea

~~~
cpinto
Great feedback.

1) Indeed, price checking is already in place so perhaps in those cases the
recommendation system can send data into them?

2) not the target market, not enough data. Remember, a small market that has
huge value is still a valuable market worth pursuing.

3) Of course no one browses the stores :-) But when you make a buy there,
you're already in a spending mindset so stores can take advantage of that to
promote things that may interest you more. With the receipt recommendations,
you should be able to track data across shopping sessions. Like a cookie ;-)

5) I don't think any of the possible clients will allow you to store the
details elsewhere than at their own DC.

Thanks for the feedback.

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danielharan
Lost me at "without having to go through the frustrating experience of asking
the store assistant for recommendations and getting none."

Is this seriously such a big problem that people will pay money or change
their behaviour to use your solution?

~~~
cpinto
Daniel, this is not a product for consumers it's for big retail, eg. Fnac
(Europe), etc.

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richcollins
I have yet to find any recommendation system that stands on its own (vs.
YouTube related videos for example) that I would regularly use other than HN.
Any ... recommendations?

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Myrio
Hello! In-store recommendation system in-store already exists. It is develped
by Myrio company and is implemented at Diesel store in Europe. More news on
the way from the founder of Myrio...

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chopsueyar
Are you a software company or a systems integration company?

~~~
cpinto
I have my own software company (<http://leftfield.pt>). This would be best
pulled off by people with lots of experience in software integration (CRM,
POS) both engineering as well as sales.

~~~
chopsueyar
Well congrats on getting your post up on the first page of HN!

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lowglow
There are a couple of start-ups looking to do this. The first that comes to
mind is ShopTap. They are looking to hire quality engineers right now, so you
might want to contact them if you're looking to build something like this.

~~~
cpinto
Like I said, I don't have any intention of pursuing this one any more :-) That
said, I'd be more than glad to share opinions with anyone that wants to do
this.

