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Next; let users request updates about particular stores. Hire task rabbits or provide your users with some gameified reason to go check the store.
Requesting updates about particular stores is my favorite idea here. We had a similar one: requesting updates about a particular item. :)
Awesome. About 8 years ago I was on vacation in Concan, Tx on the Frio river. There are maybe 3 stores in the area and then 3 roads out of town that each have a couple stores 10-15 miles away. I needed diapers. I didnt care what brand, I just needed some diapers. I imagined a similar idea wherein a person could search for "diapers" "beer" "charcoal" or whatever and find the closest item. Glad to see it has come to ex…
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At the same time, we should also avoid people going from store to store until they find a store that has what they are looking for. Which this helps with.
My point is that if they don't find what they're looking for, I think the right solution is to get a substitute or go without.
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My point is that if they don't find what they're looking for, I think the right solution is to get a substitute or go without.
And you think this app not existing is going to motivate people to do that?
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And you think this app not existing is going to motivate people to do that?
The premise of the app is helping people to not buy substitutes or go without.
Of course it requires a critical mass of people reporting before it becomes widely useful, and thinking cynically, I could see people "InStock-bombing" their local store - saying it's out of everything - in hopes of driving people away and keeping it for themselves. But if you've solved both of those problems and/or found them not to be problems, I think this could be really helpful Edit: Also, I just tried to search…
I hear you on the cynacism. We'll just have to see what happens. Regarding the app store name, thanks for that feedback. We couldn't use InStock unfortunately since it was already taken, but we'll definitely think about this. Regarding the store search results, we are using an api for this and this is quickly floating to the top of our backlog as something to work on for the next release. Thanks for the feedback on t…
Understandable; one solution would be to adopt the App Store name as the new "real name" and put it on your website, etc.
> Thanks for the feedback on this as well, as it helps us prioritize the things that really matter to people. :)
Sure thing! Best of luck.
it would have been somewhat would be useful if you could tie into inventory systems like brickseek, or directly from online grocers/amazon-wholefoods/instacart. but... during this time, even those systems are unreliable so i cant imagine this being of much use as of now.
good point. we agree that this would be useful, even if the information isn't perfect. you're exactly right to point out that the information isn't perfect, by the way. I was just at a store earlier doing some personal shopping and I noticed they had employees counting the items because their inventory system wasn't reliable.
That's just the normal way to do inventory, and has no real relationship to the reliability of the inventory system. There's no other way to account for inventory shrinkage (eg. theft, damage).
Awesome intentions behind the idea, but I've got to be realistic: how on earth are you going to motivate enough people to report on availability? I'm a huge fan of crowdsourcing, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the math works out even remotely here. It's very, very different from Waze in this aspect.
Devil advocate: why do people report things on Waze? What motivates someone to report road conditions when it doesn't really benefit them?
With stores that have thousands of products, and the app is only useful based on it's accuracy for each individual product, you need many, many more people reporting because their reports are spread over so many products.
TBH, I don't think this idea is workable, mainly because for the most in-demand items where you want a service like this, the inventory changes by the minute. I mean, whole aisles of toilet paper can easily be cleared out in 10 minutes even when purchases are limited to one package per customer. It takes me 10 mins to drive to the nearest grocery store.
I recognize an app is more convenient but I do find that sometimes people forget that they can call the store to check if they really need something.