The online shopping experience can be overwhelming. Even sorting through the various filters for style, clothing type, etc. is tiring, and then you throw in the fact that there are about a hundred different sites to navigate and things get even more difficult.
Of course, we tolerate this because it’s still easier than trekking around to a dozen different stores and fighting for a dressing room and waiting in line. But what if you could take the simplicity of the IRL browsing experience and combine it with the convenience and comfort of online shopping?
That’s where ShuffleHub comes in.
ShuffleHub aggregates all your favorite online storefronts and simplifies the process. After choosing women’s or men’s clothing, you’re instantly shown eight products with large images and a product name. When you press the spacebar, you get eight more items. It’s like Shuffle for your shopping experience.
Of course, you can filter by clothing type or store if you choose, but users who want to passively shop online don’t need to do anything but press the space bar to wander through the land of online consumer goods. If you’re on an iPad, you simply press the bottom right hand side of the screen (where your thumb goes) to shuffle on.
Once you’ve chosen an item, ShuffleHub sends you to the retailer page to purchase.
Want to go back? Click anywhere.
That’s right. ShuffleHub is built specifically for laziness, so sloths like me don’t have to work too hard during the super exhausting process of sitting on the couch and shopping online.
To start, ShuffleHub is aggregating Asos, Selfridges, Urban Outfitters, Top Shop and Top Man, with more coming in the future. Awesomely enough, ShuffleHub doesn’t even need existing partnerships with these retailers as the company can just scrape the sites for this information and organize it on ShuffleHub.
The company makes money through affiliate links, which vary from site to site, but co-founder Joshua Summers explains that is around 5 percent at the moment.
Q&A
Q: What are your costs?
A: We have a very low cost of operation because we just connect the customer with the shop and don’t have to worry about things like customer fulfillment or customer service or distribution. We are the UI for online shopping.
Q: What’s the core technology behind this?
A: Right now the shuffle is random but our vision is to curate the products, pull data to the site, and personalize the experience. That will be the IP that awill make a difference. The more you use ShuffleHub, the more we understand you.
Q: How are you going to drive people to the site?
A: We are our own market and we know what users want. We don’t like old-school navigation and working to shop, but we like easter eggs and things that connect us to our friends. We like large imagery. Because we understand the demographic, it’ll be easy to see organic growth.