If you are someone who is addicted to online shopping chances are you would be having wishlists created on every e-tailing site you shop from. The reasons for it could be many – you are waiting for the price of the particular product to drop, you want to get a friend’s opinion before making that purchase or you are simply in a dilemma to buy it irrespective of everything. In other words, having wishlists has a number of benefits. But the only problem is you would have to log on to every particular e-tailing site to access your wishlist. However, there is a reasonably good solution for it now.
Scrapehere, which was launched on December 12, 2012 the day when the Great Online Shopping Festival was held, provides its users with the option to create personalized and centralised wishlists called ‘collections’. That means you can create a collection of products from various online shopping sites which you intend to purchase at a later date and that too in a manner you want. What’s more, you can also create a price-drop alert for any product. The social aspect of it allows users to seek opinions from their friends on social networking sites.
How Does It Work?
First and foremost, Scrapehere works on the principle of Pinterest, that is, in order to add products to your collections you would need to add the ‘Scrape’ bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks bar beforehand. Even the user interface is quite Pinterest-like.
To get started you can either opt for social login or go the traditional way of filling up the form. You are then taken to the dashboard. You can add the ‘Scrape’ button to the bookmarks bar from the ‘Scrape+’ section. To add a product to your collection you would need to visit the particular e-tailing site, go to the particular product’s page and ‘scrape’ it. You can choose the collection to which you wish to add the product, type in the price and set the purchase priority on the scale. You can even add relevant tags to it.
However, there is also an alternate but inconvenient way to add products to your collections which is by manually filling up product details along with its URL. When you add a product to your collection, it is simultaneously shared with your friends/followers on the social networks to which you provide permission to post about your activities.
With regard to collections you can create your own or use the default ones. The collections you create can either be made public or kept private. You can also follow other users’ collections and comment on them. Similarly, you can also ‘collect’ products from other users’ collections, an option which is equivalent to the ‘repin’ feature of Pinterest.
One prime feature of Scrapehere is ‘Price Watch’ which informs you when a product’s price drops to a pre-defined level. In order to set a ‘price watch’ for a particular product, you would need to go to its page in your collections and fill in its current and desired prices along with your email address.
The Scrapehere dashboard, apart from the above-mentioned features, provides a huge space for notifications. It also gives options to check out ‘scraped’ products according to different categories as well as the trending, recent and popular scrapes.
How good is it?
The Scrapehere platform, on the whole, has got a no-frills, user-friendly interface. The colour scheme of green texts, textured grey backgrounds and a bit of white at the right places makes it easy on the eye. The Pinterest-inspired design makes the task of browsing other scrapes effortless. The only downsides to its design are – i) the text that appears when you hover the cursor over the scrapes while browsing looks a bit unrefined & ii) the home page of the dashboard has got a very large space dedicated to notifications which is at most of the times empty. It could rather be used for displaying the user’s collections.
The ‘Price Watch’ is a very useful feature. It eliminates the need to constantly check whether the prices of the products in your collection have fallen or not. The priority scale option, on the other hand, is a valuable feature for the brands, e-tailers and anyone who is interested in understanding consumer behaviour. The Trending, Recent and Popular sections facilitate in discovering what fellow users are thinking of buying, in a way helping in finding products that one may find useful.
Could it be better?
However, there are some areas which need some fine-tuning. For example, when I logged in from Facebook the app didn’t give the option to disallow ‘posting on my behalf’. Though the whole purpose of this app is its seamless social integration I would have liked it if I could control what I am sharing with my friends.
Also, when you create a price watch for a product you need to provide your e-mail address. The point is when I log in from Facebook I expect the app to fetch my personal details including my e-mail address. So why do I need to provide it every time? And finally, when you scrape a product you need to enter its price yourself. I would like it to fetch the price of the product just as it does all my other details. Typing in the price every time gets a bit annoying.
The concept of Scrapehere is actually a good one. Though there are other apps/platforms which offer to create wishlists they are not really similar to Scrapehere. The fact that it allows users to aggregate products from online shopping sites which they wish to buy later along with the ability to share them with their online peers and get their opinions about them, is what sets it apart. If it fixes the above-mentioned things it would become a lot easier to use the app.
So how did you like the concept of Scrapehere? As an online shopper does it excite you? I would be glad to know your thoughts below.