Plurchase Blog

Shop with Friends

big release

by Jeff

We just updated plurchase.com with some important new functionality.  Two main areas of improvement:

1) direct merchant integration.  Lots of merchants have been contacting us, asking to integrate with plurchase.  We now have a solution in place that lets merchants add a "shop with friends" button on their site. Click, and plurchase starts on that very same page. Take a look at the demo.

2) you can now use plurchase with friends who are not currently online. It's more fun when friends are simultaneously online, but works seamlessly if you miss each other. You can discuss and vote on the items your friends are considering, and get a notification when friends do the same for you.

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Do you want to add your store to Plurchase?

We've received a number of requests from merchants asking us to add their store.  If you would like your store to be added to an upcoming release of Plurchase, please contact us here: feedback@plurchase.com.  It's a great way for users to discover new stores they haven't heard of and allows them to shop with their friends and spread the word to their social network.  We can add your merchant site to Plurchase with very little integration effort on your part.  You'll automatically gain all the current and upcoming social features we're planning to add to Plurchase, and you don't have to do anything!

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Mashable

by Jeff

Great review on Mashable: Plurchase: E-commerce Goes Social

It's part of their Spark of Genius series.  :)

Only downside is that I'm not yet finished with an important feature... notifications, so you're alerted as your friends arrive after sending a come-shop-with-me tweet or email invitation.  

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Post launch feedback

By Dean

The launch on TechCrunch made waves through the twitterverse and blogosphere.  I'm quite happy how the launch went, even though most of the users visiting probably won't be our core user base, it was still good to hear lots of positive feedback.  People in the professional e-commerce community were hoping that this might be the solution that would actually bring social components to merchant sites since most sites still haven't made progress leveraging social networks.  Here's a few tidbits extracted from the twitterverse about our launch:

Just checked out www.Plurchase.com new social shopping site. Interesting potential for inside-out comparison shopping sans CSE sites

Very interesting, eager to watch progress. best implementation of this concept i've seen

Dear Catalog CEOs: Are you considering this? www.plurchase.com.  Not sure it will catch on, and who cares?!! Try!

The difference is Plurchase is a many-to-many service vs Shoptogether being a one-to-many.

Congrats on your launch .... great to see new clever tech. incr. buyer satisfaction and pushing potentially more sales online!

I think Plurchase and I may grow to be lifelong friends: http://www.plurchase.com

Now that we've launched, we can actually start iterating, measuring, and tweaking new social features to help grow our user base.  I wish I could read japanese because there were quite a few mentions in the japanese community about our product.  I'm very eager to add localization to our application so that users overseas can also be potential customers.  It should be quite easy for us since we don't have many pages that require translation.  We're also adding a bunch of new stores very soon so keep an eye out on this blog!

 

 

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plurchase is live!

Read all about it on TechCrunch!

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Delayed launch, but more features!

By Dean

We were asked to delay our launch, but there's no sense in waiting around!  In the past few days we've added features that beta users were asking for, but were too big for us to fit them in the initial launch.  We've added private browsing when users enter into a page protected by SSL.  This notifies that their own connection is encrypted by SSL, as well as preventing other shoppers in the same chat room to see what you're looking at.  The picture shows what a secure page looks like.

Another feature users have been asking for is support for multiple tabs.  Many of us browse the web normally by opening up a link in a new tab so that we can look at it later.  It is a way to remind ourselves that we want to take a look, but "not right now".  Previously you could still open up browser windows in new tabs, but you wouldn't get the app bar that contains the chat room and other features.  We took a look at how GMail does their GTalk chat system and we're trying to make it equally similar so that shoppers will feel right at home.

Stay tuned for our real launch early next week!

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How does it know?

by Jeff

After seeing plurchase in action, a lot of people are curious to know how it works. I might be shopping on zappos.com, my friend is on amazon.com, and plurchase shows us a little preview of what product each person is currently viewing... how is that possible?

Using plurchase, when you shop on a merchant site you're actually connecting to that site through our custom proxy server. In a manner of speaking, it's as if this proxy server has its own web browser that does whatever you do. When you click a link, you're telling plurchase to click that link too. So the plurchase server will also see the result: a pair of furry purple slippers!! If you invited friends to shop with you, plurchase will immediately share this awesome find with them.

This technology makes possible interesting forms of collaborative shopping. Besides sharing product info in different ways, like facebook or twitter, plurchase can also grow in more specialized directions. For example, if enough people want us to, we'll create a tool for personal shopping, where one person first fills up a shopping cart then tells plurchase to pass ownership of it to someone else, who buys it.

Tell us what features you'd like to see.

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Questions answered

By Dean

Some of our technically minded beta testers had some questions about security and privacy of the system.  I thought it might be good to mention what actually happens on the server side to let our users feel more comfortable using Plurchase.

  • We don't log messages in our chat system (the box in the lower right corner).  What you say to your friends is none of our business.  The chat messages are sent to our server, then rebroadcasted.  
  • When you enter information in web forms on a merchant site, this data is immediately proxied to the merchant, we don't log any of this data.  If our server is ever compromised (even if they steal the physical server!), the thieves won't have access to any data about purchases you may have made through our shopping system.
  • If the merchant uses SSL on a particular web page, we will also provide that same webpage using our SSL certificate so that your data is encrypted with the same level of security that the merchant originally intended.
  • If you enter data into web forms, users who are shopping with you will not see what you typed in.  We're not a web conferencing solution -- your shopping state is completely independent from anyone else who may be shopping with you.
And finally, we'd like to borrow Google's motto "don't be evil".  We're here to create an entertaining shopping experience, not sell customer data to evil people.

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Our Tech

By Dean

I figured when we hit front page Hacker News, people will want to know about some of our tech.  Some people may not realize how much technology goes into something simple like Plurchase until they do a right-click view-source.  We've got a wonderful extensible custom proxy server, integrated with a real-time comet system, with lots and lots of javascript glue code.  When we talked with PG, he kept pushing us to work harder and get it launched before the end of the funding round, but when you've got all this technology under the hood, it's hard to make things work right.  If Plurchase was done in 1999 when the web didn't have iframes, flash, and ajax, we would have been done a few months ago.  We probably still have a few more months of hard work to make the shopping system work for all merchants, but we're quite happy with what we've got so far.  It's a MVP that users will actually find valuable and a product we can feel happy about.  The technologies we picked will enable us to make lots of quick iterations on the core product to create features users will love.  

  • Ruby - technically JRuby/Rails.  Ruby has a great community of hackers, even if there people like _why and zed that make it interesting (btw, they're great people if you meet them in person).  Stuff like Facebooker, OAuth, and Rspec make it extremely easy to implement new features in a very short amount of time.
  • Javascript - mostly JQuery.  We considered using Sproutcore and Cappuccino, but we really liked the jQuery framework for doing UI work.  Most of our MVC stuff is home grown though.  Personally, I'm hoping Sproutcore finalizes their 1.0 base soon because the last time I looked at their alpha versions, they were basically unusable for production work (about 3 months ago).  They use jQuery as a core library so our migration there will likely be easier.  Makes sense to use a framework here soon, but we only have around 12,000 lines of javascript so far.  We've also implemented some awesome stuff that made code fast:  monomorphic inline caches in javascript (non-jquery) sped up some parts of our code by almost 20x.
  • Java - people like to say bad things about Java.  There aren't many features in the Java language, but at least it's decently fast and has lots of great libraries.  We have 94 jar files in our lib directory, but some of these we aren't making full use of yet (like shindig & nekohtml).  It's interesting to use both Hibernate and ActiveRecord at the same time.  If you look closely enough, you might notice where GWT and flagstone are being used.  
  • Comet - specifically Jetty/Cometd.  We're slightly concerned about its ability to scale, but hopefully when it becomes a serious problem, that should mean we can hire someone to help us improve it.  Supposedly Jetty's Cometd can handle around 10,000 concurrent long polling sessions, but we'll have to see just how likely that is.  I figure we won't even hit 100 concurrent users after launch.
  • Haproxy - nothing really fancy here, but it's a life saver when you're trying to integrate comet, rails, and servlets under one hood.  We're using stunnel for ssl, and shorewall for the firewall

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Only three stores?

By Dean

We're only a day or so away from launch and some of the beta users are wondering why we've only got 3 stores right now (in beta mode, they could see hundreds of stores).  Adding a store is easy for us -- it's just adding 2 rows to our database and then setting a visibility flag on it.  We're launching with 3 stores to keep our product quality high and so that we can find out roughly what types of stores others are interested in.  We've heard from a number of beta users that they'd love to use Plurchase for buying hotels & plane tickets.  Apparently it's actually pretty hard to coordinate travel when all you've got is email an instant messaging.  We've also heard from a vocal minority that they want to use it for Ebay auctions -- lots of bargain hunters like to scour craigslist and ebay for goods and compare notes on product lists.  

The female crowd is clamoring for a set of boutique online clothing stores -- most of which I've never heard of.  We've added a little UserVoice widget on the search panel so that users can vote on what stores they want to see and we'll slowly add them as we verify each store for correctness.  Majority of the sites work fairly well, the ones that are harder to get right usually have lots and lots of javascript & flash -- sites like orbitz, kayak, and bing travel might require a bit more thinking on our part.  

A few users also complained that we didn't support their web browser -- IE6.  We're planning to support it, however it's not a great use of time right now.  We want to focus on improving quality and adding new features for shoppers.  If you're stuck on the IE6 web browser, we do provide the option of installing the IE6 Google Chrome Frame plugin.  I've used this on my old Windows XP machine and it works great.  Simply attempt to use Plurchase and you'll be redirected to a page where it will prompt you to install the frame plugin.  Once installed, you'll have to close all Internet Explorer windows that might still be open.  The next time you visit Plurchase, you'll have the Google Chrome experience embedded into your IE6 web browser.  Also, if you're using IE7, this is currently the only option of using Plurchase.  Although IE7 is marginally better than IE6, it's still not a very good web browser compared to the rest of the competition out there.

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