Walmart launched shopycat, a social shopping Facebook app that takes shared data from your friends' profiles and news feeds and transforms them into gift ideas.
Walmart has built this application which it acquired from the social media startup Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs) earlier this year, a unit of the company based just south of San Francisco which develops social-networking and mobile technologies for the retailer.
"Gifting is fundamentally a social activity," said Venky Harinarayan, co-head of @Walmartlabs e-commerce and social commerce development unit based in Mountain View, Calif. "It's about people connecting with other people through products. It's a huge overall business opportunity. It's something that's not done very well on the web today. Shopycat is the first step in what we think is a very strategic area for the industry as a whole.” he added.
The application captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events.
How does it work
Shopycat uses data from Facebook pages to estimate a person's top 10 friends. It then recommends suitable gifts for those friends, based on information shared via Facebook.
Users can click on a single interest to see gifts that relate to the selected interest. A click on the gift shows its detailed description and a buy link that connects to the retailer’s product page.
Shopycat also surfaces friends for whom to buy gifts, based on how much people interact with them. Users can also get notifications of their birthdays.
Type “Shopycat” in the search bar to go to the app’s page which explains exactly what the app will access from users’ profiles. Further, to avoid spoiling the surprise "Shopycat" does not post anything on a user’s profile.
The Challenge:
What may be a gift to one person may be junk to another. Just because I post an update about a product doesn’t necessarily mean I want to have it as a gift. A product that is new or a special edition of a product, for example can make it more “gift-worthy,” says Venky Harinarayan, senior vice president of Walmart global ecommerce and cofounder of @WalmartLabs. “Capturing that in an algorithm is a challenge,” Harinarayan says. “We have to get better. It’s a great and interesting technology problem. Trying to capture the signals is super important as we start to scale this.”
