Solecial.com – Social Shoe Shopping
Solecial.com is a site that my friend and I created to help people find and buy shoes online.
The basic idea is that you can search across multiple vendors to see who has a particular shoe in stock, in your size, at the lowest price… but the social aspect also helps you discover more shoes by seeing what others like/have/dislike. You can also create your own lists of shoes that you have or want, etc and send that to your friends.
The site then uses this data to help shoppers visually see whats hot and whats not. Each shoe page also has other data such as price history, user uploaded photos, and user comments to help you decide if its the right pair for you.
We are in the middle of implementing Facebook Connect to really open up the social aspect of the site, but right now its still mostly driven by the comparison shopping engine while we continue to collect data from our users via a simple thumbs up and thumbs down button for each shoe.
An interesting techincal note… this site is now hosted on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud services, and so far it works great! Much faster than our old dedicated servers actually.
