

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.<p>I have an idea for a few social elements that I want to add to try and make more of a community.<p>Any feedback, tips etc welcome.<p>http://shoplove.co.uk
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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).

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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?

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Jim_Neath
At the moment, I'm aiming at affiliate sales. I'm open to other solutions
though :)

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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!

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sktrdie
Actually his design feels higher end than that saks-fifth-avanue website.

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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?

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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

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Jim_Neath
Clickable: <http://shoplove.co.uk>

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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 :)

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

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bobds
Do all the shops you've included provide a datafeed for affiliates?

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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.

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mofle
Why not for men too?

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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.

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follower
What has been her response to the site?

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Jim_Neath
Well she's pregnant again so she's finding it useful :D

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sktrdie
Haha! Congrats :)

