We just launched few improvements to the navigation flow of Shopalize.com.

 

Simplied navigation sections

Previously we used to show 3 sections in the left navigation column - 

• Feeds - to navigate whose activities you want to see i.e. Everyone, Your friends, or some specific person.
• Activities - to navigate what type of activities you want to see e.g. Deals, Pictures.
• Categories - to navigate activities from specific shopping categories.

We just made that flow little simpler to navigate. Now we removed "Feeds" section. So by default, when you're not signed in, you'll see activities by Everyone on the home page. But when you're signed in, you'll see activities by your Friends' on the home page. If you want to see activities by Everyone while you're signed in, then there is new Tab navigation added on your home page just above the activity stream as shown below.

Similarly, if you want to get back to your home timeline from Everyone's activities, then just click "Home" link from top navigation bar. To see your own activities, click on "Profile" link on top navigation bar as shown below -

 

More activity filters

Another big change we made was to improve the "Activities" section. Now we have more options to filter out activities shared based on what you're interested in looking for. You can browse by - 

• Purchases
• Deals & Coupons
• Pictures
• Products

Here are some of the live examples - 

1. Discovering popular Purchases by Everyone -

 

2. Discovering popular Deals by Everyone -

 

3. Discovering Purchases by Your Friends when you're signed in -

 

We hope you'll like these small improvements in navigation flow. Let us know if things are still confusing or if you've any suggestions. We'll update again with some backend related updates soon. Till then, keep Shopalizing...

We're happy to show you the improved Sign-in flow for Shopalize.com. As you might already know, currently Shopalize supports signing in via only your Twitter account. Since it's primarily a Twitter based application, we started with simple one click sign-in via Twitter only. This way, you don't have to register to Shopalize by giving out your email/password/username combinations again to one more site. So our goal was to simplify this process by simply keeping one-click sign-in flow. So far so, we've had it working on Shopalize fine, but the experience was not very smooth. When someone clicks on "Sign-in" button, it used to take you to Twitter page, and then it would take you back to Shopalize page again. But many people would not understand why they are leaving Shopalize page to sign-in. Also, many times Twitter wouldn't even redirect back to you to Shopalize after you enter your credentials on Twitter successfully. We have heard this complaint from many users, especially the ones who were using Chrome browser. With Chrome's increasing popularity, we're seeing almost 20% traffic comes from Chrome browser. And most of the Chrome users would see broken sign-in flow. We wanted to fix it. Then we thought let's not just fix it, but let's make it even more pleasant and smooth. And here is what we're releasing today - a smooth sign-in flow.

Now when you click on Sign-in button, it first explains you what it is about, and asks your permission that it would take you to Twitter's login page.

If you're not already signed-in with Twitter, then you'll have to enter your Twitter's login credentials on their website. Please note, you're not entering your login credentials on Shopalize website. We never learn what your login credentials are. So you're in safe hands. Here is how the Twitter login window will look like.

Once you enter those details successfully, the Shopalize page from where you clicked sign-in button will get refreshed with your login permissions. Now, we don't send you to Twitter page and then it doesn't redirect you back to Shopalize. Everything happens seamlessly on Shopalize page only. You never go away from Shopalize page, so there are no surprises. Here is how the page looks once you're successfully signed-in.

We hope you'll like these small improvements in user experience. Keep Shopalizing!

 

 

 

Just a few days ago I tweeted that - "I wish there was a 'Like' button for statuses on Twitter. No, 'Retweet' or 'Favorite' is not same as 'Like' it".

Liking is not same as Retweeting or Favoriting it

Missing "Like" functionality in Twitter ecosystem is a little frustrating experience. When you discover an interesting shopping update or deal that your friend has shared on Shopalize, you either really want to show appreciation for that content since it's useful or simply show your expression that you found it very interesting. You might say that we can show appreciation by "Retweeting" the same update, which is kind of true to certain extent, but it is not same as "Liking" it in all the cases.

"Retweeting" is a valid option when you think that the content you found interesting will also be relevant to your followers. But when you think that the content won't be relevant to your followers, "Retweeting" doesn't seem to be the best option. But that doesn't mean you can't appreciate your friend for sharing that interesting update in the first place. You just want to show your expression that you really liked that update, and be done with it. Also, "Like"s stay with that original update, which essentially speak for the quality of that content. Since all "Like"s staty with the original update, we can see which other people also liked this update. On the other hand, "Favorite"s in Twitter ecosystem don't stay with status updates. We can't tell who else has favorited this status update. 

The missing "Like" link

So we think that "Like" is a missing functionality in Twitter ecosystem to show appreciation and expression towards interesting content. And that's precisely the reason, we're launching "Like" functionality for shopping updates that are shared on Shopalize. We just launched an easy way to tell your friends that you like what they're shopping with one easy click. For each shopping update, you have an option to click on the "Like" link and tell your friends that: "I like this."

Here is how this feature looks in the action -

So if you click the "Like" link above, you are expressing feelings like "Awesome!", "Very cool!", etc. This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new "Like" feature to be the stars, and the "Reply" and "Retweet" to be the review.

 

Share on Twitter

You can be even more vocal in expressing your "Like"s by sharing it on Twitter and letting your friends know that you liked their shopping update. When you click on the "Like" link, we register your activity in Shopalize world, and then ask you if you also want to share this on Twitter. Sharing on Twitter is a completely opt-in feature, meaning, you can decide not to post your likes on Twitter by simply clicking "Cancel" button, and we won't be posting anything on your behalf. Here is how it asks for a permission when you click on a "Like" link -

If you choose to opt-in and post it on Twitter, here is how it looks on Twitter - we post exactly what you decide to post. Note that this status update contains a link back to your shopping update on Shopalize, so that your friends and followers can know which exact shopping update you liked.

In the end, we believe that your friends and their shopping updates make Shopalize great. When your friends share something great, let them know you like it. Hope this new "Like" functionality will enable you do that in just one click and you'll find it useful too. 

 

As usual, this functionality is not fully baked yet. There are still few enhancements that we want to make. We will be improving how we notify your friends on Shopalize when you like their shopping updates and also give you an option to "Unlike" some update that you liked accidentally. We just wanted to get this feature out in your hand soon, and see if you have any suggestions or inputs for us. So let us know all your suggestions, as we want to get better every single day. More to come soon, till then, happy Shopalizing...

We're very excited to show you our new enhancement that will improve your experience of how you browse "Popular Products" on Shopalize.com. As you know, Shopalize's goal is to help you discover cool products and deals that your friends and other people are buying, but also something which interest you. While helping you do that, we always think about how can we improve your experience about how you discover and browse these interesting products. Few months ago, we announced our first try - the launch of "Product Pages". That was certainly better than just browsing textual updates. Many of you told us that it was very useful improvement.

 

Products Separation based on Categories

But now it's time to push the envelop and go one more step beyond. Now instead of showing many products from different categories mixed together on "Popular Products" page, we're separating out products from same Category togehter and showing few different categories on the same page. This is much better visual experience. It gives more clarirty. Check out below how it works in action for popular products from both "Home & Garden" category and "Shoes" categories.

 

More Browsing with Less Hassle

The improvements don't just stop there. Now you can also browse more products from category that interest you more by just clicking on ">" i.e. "Next" or "<" i.e. "Previous" arrows. This means browsing more products with less hassle and much better experience! Check out below this experience in action -

By clicking ">" arrow, shows you more products in the same area -

We hope you'll these improve your experience and you will find it useful while browsing more products and deals on Shopalize. If you want to browse even more products from a particular category, then click on the category name link from the left navigation panel on Shopalize.com.

 

More to come...

As usual, we're not fully done yet. We still have to keep improving the quality and accuracy of the data, improve the algorithm which decides which products are popular, and remove spam, etc. Then we also have to add support for showing products from more merchants. So there is still lot to do.

Please give us your feedback, ideas or suggestions you may have. Let us know what should we improve more and how can we solve your problems in discovering great products and deals that your friends and other people are buying. We're listening, as we really want to make Shopalize better every single day!

If you have noticed before, the Search functionality on Shopalize was unstable for past few weeks. Due to technical challenges, we were not able to provide that functionality all the time. So we had to take it down intermittently.

Search is a very core part of Shopalize's offering to help you find out what people are buying or talking about different products or brands "right now". The extra emphasis on "right now" shows that how important it is for us to show the real-time search results. So finally, after few challenges and hiccups, we're able to bring that functionality back to you. We'll monitor the progress for next few days, and make sure it remains stable and usable.

Current Search experience gives you highly relevant results, and it's quite fast. Try these examples - 

• "nikon d90" - http://shopalize.com/search?q=nikon+d90
• "levis jeans" - http://shopalize.com/search?q=levis+jeans
• "led tv" - http://shopalize.com/search?q=led+tv

There are still many interesting things we're planning to do to improve the search experience, so stay tuned for more advanced features. In the meantime, we hope you will find the current search functionality useful and also get relevant results. Let us know if you have ideas, suggestions or issues using this search functionality.

Continuing with our focus on improving your experience at Shopalize, we're launching few enhancements to existing features on Shopalize.

Retweeted by Whom

Till now we were showing just the number of people who have retweeted your shopping update. We just enhanced it more and now also show who all have retweeted your shopping update. Following are some screen shots of how this feature looks in action -

Just below the time at which your update was posted, we show user names of few people who have retweeted your shopping update. 

If you click on "3 others" link, then it will show you all the people who have retweeted your shopping update.

Hope this will help you discover interesting people to follow on Shopalize...

 

Expand Short URLs

The problem with 140 character limit while posting a shopping update is that you have to shorten the long URLs. But when you are browsing other people's shopping updates that contain shortened URLs, you don't know where that shortened URL is going to take you when you click on it. You don't want to land up on a website which you were not intending to land on. So we're adding tiny feature that will be helpful to you. For every short URL, we now show "expand" option right next to it. When you click on "expand", we'll show the original long URL and the "expand" link will be converted to "contract" link. Hope this will help you to browse shopping updates more efficiently. Following are some screen shots of how this feature looks in action -

Check out the "expand" link near bit.ly link.

If you click on "expand" link, it will look as below -

 

As usual, hope these small design improvements will be helpful to you. Keep Shopalizing, as more interesting updates are coming soon.

It's been quite some time that we've updated you about the progress we're making at Shopalize. Though sometimes it does not look very obvious, but we're constantly improving Shopalize. A big part of what we're doing is improving our backend infrastructure, technology, algorithms, and site reliability. We're still not done with making all those improvements, but meanwhile, we've also tried to improve the user experience on some of the things that we've got few requests about in the past.

User Profile Pages & Follow/Unfollow Actions

We've revamped the user profile pages a bit. We have always had a profile page for each user, but there was no emphasis on that user and we were not showing his background information briefly anywhere on that page. Now below is the new look of user's profile page on Shopalize.

Also, if you find some new user's shopping updates interesting on Shopalize, and you were not following that user already on Twitter, then you were not able to start following that user's shopping updates on Shopalize. This is one of those features that few people have requested in the past for couple of times, which we finally got time to work on. Now while you are viewing any user's profile page, you also see "Follow" button. By following that user, you can now receive their shopping updates in your "Home" timeline. You can also choose to follow this user's other updates on Twitter by clicking the checkbox for "Also Follow on Twitter".

 

Once you follow someone on Shopalize, you can always "Unfollow" them by clicking unfollow button. Again, you can choose to also unfollow that user's updates on Twitter by selecting "Also Unfollow on Twitter" checkbox. We hope this little but useful additions to User profile pages will be helpful to you to discover interesting users and follow their interesting shopping updates on Shopalize.

Tool-tips to Help Navigation

This is another tiny little feature we just added to help you navigate through the left side's links. Below are just some examples showing it in action. 

First, a tool-tip showing your "Home" timeline with updates from your friends and you.

Second, a tool-tip showing "Public" timeline with updates from everyone.

Third, a tool-tip showing only shopping updates which has interesting "Pictures" in it.

And last, a tool-tip showing shopping updates from only "Shoes" Category.

 

Hope these tool tips will help you better understand what each link means and what type of shopping updates it will show you once you click on it.

As usual, we're still making lot of improvements to Shopalize and trying to improve our backend infrastructure to help you discover interesting products and deals that your friends are buying. Till then, stay tuned and keep Shopalizing…

We're really thrilled to announce Shopalize.com's new feature - "Product Pages" - a simple and effective way to discover interesting products that are getting shared on Twitter.

Using this new feature, now you don't have to browse through bunch of textual status updates and click on bunch of links and then realize that those are not the products that you were interested in. Shopalize makes this process a lot easier for you. Instead of showing product links buried down under the textual updates, we simply show you Products and its relevant information like Title, Description, Images, and Prices. This way, it's much easier to browse, consume, comprehend shopping updates and it's much effective to take any action as well e.g. buying it. In short, we're improving signal vs noise ratio with huge margins about how you consume shopping related updates on Twitter.

This improvement is the natural progression of our previous feature announcement - "shopping updates with meaningful product information". In that, we showed how we enhanced plain textual updates by showing more meaningful product information like Title, Description, Images, and Prices right below the textual part of an update. While many of you liked it a lot and found it very useful, the focus was still showing a list of textual statuses. Many of you suggested that it was still very hard to digest and find useful information from it.

We heard you guys. To solve this problem, we're focusing on products instead of statuses for public timeline. We are unveiling two useful and powerful product centric pages to consume information more easily - "Popular Products" and "Product Details".

Popular Products

Instead of showing a feed to textual status updates, we're showing a feed of most popular products and deals that are getting shared right now. You can find a link of "Popular Products" on the left-side navigation bar under Feeds section. This page shows you products from all categories. It shows you a product image, title, it's current discounted price (if any) vs it's normal list price. Here is how it looks -

But that's not all. If you're interested in seeing today's popular products and deals from only Shoes category, then click on "Shoes" link in the left-side navigation bar under Category section while you've also clicked on "Popular Products". Here is how it looks -

 

Product Details

But that's not done either. You still don't see the detail description about a particular product, which people have shared that product, what they are talking about it, etc. So you can click on any Product and will be taken to the "Product Details" page. Here is how it looks -

Having said all that, we're still not done yet. We still have lots of work to do - primarily to improve the quality and accuracy of the data, improve the algorithm which decides which products are popular, and to remove spam, etc. Then we also have to support more merchants, and then focus on improving the usability as well. But as usual - as a lean startup, we just wanted to get this feature out quickly in your hands so that you could play with it and give us your feedback. Currently we started small, but have great ideas and big plans to improve all those areas in next few months. But please let us know what's more important to you. Give us your feedback, any ideas or suggestions you may have. We're listening, as we really want to get better every single day!

Stay tuned and keep Shopalizing...it's fun!

We're extremely excited to launch a new feature today for Shopalize.com - "shopping updates with meaningful product information". This feature improves how you consume what your friends and other people are buying and sharing. Now you don't have to browse only plain textual updates, instead they will be enhanced by showing relevant product information like Title, Description, Images, and Prices right below the textual part of an update to make it relevant, meaningful and actionable.

Currently, most of the shopping updates on Twitter are just plain textual updates. Some might have a product or deal URL in it. And most of the times, these product or deal URLs are shortened with some URL shortner services. Thus you don't know before clicking on that short URL that to which website that click is going to lead you. So the first part of improvement is to show you the full URL path instead of showing cryptic short URL, so you know before clicking where exactly you will be landed.

But this doesn't solve another important problem. You don't know if that click is going to be useful to you or not. You don't know if that product or deal is going to be interesting to you or not. Why waste time in clicking to find that it was not useful or interesting product?

That's when Shopalize's new feature comes handy for help. Now for shopping updates, which have product or deal URL, we not only show the full path of that URL, but we also show Title, Description, Images, and Price of that product within that update. This makes your browsing experience richer for shopping related updates. Now by looking at the product images or reading the description, you know if that product is relevant and interesting to you, and is it worth clicking on it.

Here is how your shopping updates will be enhanced - first, an update posted from Shopalize, which is also posted to your Twitter stream. See how the same update looks on Twitter, and how it becomes more meaningful and rich on Shopalize.

Textual update on Twitter -

Enhanced update on Shopalize -

Here is another example of how a shopping deal looks like -

One more example on how it enhances your browsing experience -

One disclaimer though - we're not done yet. Think this feature is our sneak preview of what's coming next. We started small with few merchants, but we've big plans to expand to many merchants very soon. As we always say - we try to get out something in your hands as early as possible so that you can play around with it, and then give us some valuable feedback about how we can improve your experience or if there are any suggestions.

Also, we're going to unveil a whole new experience of how you discover popular products and deals that everyone is buying and sharing right now on Twitter. Stay tuned, it's going to be really valuable, as we're getting better every single day.

 

We're very excited to launch this feature as it gives more power to you guys! Now you can discover shopping activities that only interest you by selecting different Subcategories on Shopalize.com.

We've heard from few users that the ability to filter out different shopping activities like "Deals and Coupons", "Pictures", and "Links" just based on top level Categories like "Electronics", "Shoes", "Clothing" was not enough. It was good, but it was not better. But now we heard you guys. And we're giving you more control to filter out different shopping activities not only based on top level Categories, but also based on Subcategories under that Category. For each Category type, we've added few relevant Subcategory types. Here is what it looks like -

 

Now using these Subcategories, you can select only activities that are interesting to you. Say if you're a gadget lover, and only care about "Electronics" related shopping activities, then you can filter out those activities by clicking on "Electronics" link in the left bar. But if you are specifically interested in "Cameras", then click the '+' icon to expand the Subcategories under the "Electronics" Category, and then click on "Camera" link. Now it will show you which Cameras people are buying, or which deals they are sharing, or in general what they are talking about Cameras. Here is how it looks like -

 

 

Here is another example if you're interested in only "Sunglasses" related shopping activities -

 

 

We hope you'll enjoy this more power that you have now. We also hope you'll love those little icons the way we do. Aren't they cute?

Also, if you have suggestions about different Categories and Subcategories that we've not added yet, then please send us an email at help@shopalize.com with your suggestions. As usual, don't hesistate to tell us any issues, bug reports, or suggestions. We're listening to you, and getting better every single day.

Stay tuned and keep Shopalizing...