Why does it take so long to find the perfect pair of shoes, holiday accommodation, piece of furniture or artwork for your wall?
The answer is simple, and obvious when you think about it. 99% of what you’re looking at online was created with someone else’s tastes in mind.
There are 7 billion people in this world and we all want different things. Amazon alone lists over 200,000 shoes on their site, so it’s no wonder most of the shoes you’re scrolling through aren’t to your liking!
So what do you do instead? Well, you find websites and brands that are more aligned with your ‘style’. Now you are jumping from site to site, still filtering through hundreds of items, in the hope of finding one you like.
You probably have 10 tabs open at this point (for me it’s more like 40).
But what if you could personalise your own online shopping experience? An intelligent webpage that is able to learn your tastes and gets better and better at bringing you the things you’ll love most. A place where you can create simple watchlists and discover amazing products from brands you wouldn’t have otherwise found.
We call this a ‘Discovery Engine’. And if enough people want it, we will build it. Moonsift has recently been incepted with the aim of re-orientating the internet around the user. We believe that discovery is at least as much about the ‘discoverer’ as it is about the things they are trying to discover. So while Search is great when you know exactly what you’re looking for, Moonsift wants to be there for you when you don’t.
The road to building an engine that makes online discovery truly effortless and enjoyable will not be easy. Fortunately, the CTO of Moonsift is a Computational Neuroscientist — so if anyone knows how to do it it’s him.
We will build Moonsift iteratively and release what we hope are increasingly useful versions of the product month by month; listening to your feedback at each stage.
To get things started, we have spent the last few days putting together a simple simulation that aims to learn your taste in shoes. Soon this will be expanded into other apparel and then wider products and services, until eventually, Moonsift is able to bring you hyper-personalised browsing on everything from home décor to holidays and events in your city. Please feel free to let us know what products you would like to see added next on our Facebook page.
2019 update:
We were stunned by the response from people that tried our shoe recommender simulations and resonated with this problem. We received messages like this:
“I never send in-mails, but I read your article and at every point, I was thinking YES! … YES! … YES! I am your target market!”
We learned that choice fatigue is perhaps the biggest ‘unspoken’ problem for online shoppers. It mostly goes unspoken because choice is supposed to be a good thing. But after spending many hours, days, weeks and months watching people shop online and witnessing the ways this problem manifests (especially for style-conscious shoppers within clothing & homeware) we saw how prevalent it is. This is the paradox of choice.
64% of consumers globally say there is too much choice online (src).
38% of people say they often feel overwhelmed by the variety of options available when shopping online.
So how do they deal with this? Well, the most common approach is to make a list. 43% use bookmarks, shopping carts or shortlist the options in some other way.
Having witnessed how clunky all these list tools are:
- Separate carts/watch lists for each store
- Copying and pasting info and links
- Aesthetically poor for comparing options
We’ve decided to make the ultimate tool for keeping track and comparing all the products you’re considering on your path the purchase. A place of calm 🧘 within the cross-retail chaos of online shopping!
We see this as a natural first step in solving shoppers’ discovery problem.
2020 update:
It turned out there was a reason that a truly universal shopping list solution does not exist.
We’ve spoken with people all around the world who have already attempted to solve this problem. One thing came back loud and clear; while this may seem a somewhat simple thing to build, it’s actually an extremely complex technical problem for a myriad of reasons.
Nonetheless, we love a challenge and a promise is a promise, so we’ve persisted. The first iteration of our tool is now in public beta!
Initially, you will only be able to save items from 30 UK fashion retailers, but we’ve added a button so you can request more. We promise to integrate any new retailer you request within a week! 😬
Our aim is to eventually cover every store in the world, so instead of ending up with 100’s of tabs open, you can keep track of e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g you’re shopping for in one place.
2021 update:
We appreciate all the love we’ve been getting for our beta tool!
We cannot believe how many requests we’ve had for new retailers to be added to Moonsift. The variety of stores people are shopping at is gobsmacking.
⭐️ We’re now nearing 1,000 stores and the requests just keep on coming.
We‘ve also been receiving a lot of requests to be able to save to Moonsift on mobile, so we will investigate whether this is feasible.
2022 update:
We’re nearing 2,000 stores integrated on Moonsift now!
But the really good news is we’ve been up to some wizardry 🧙♂️ and believe we can jump from 2,000 to infinity (i.e. save to Moonsift from literally any store in the world 🌎!!)
No more tabs, no more random lists or different baskets at all the different stores you visit. A truly universal wishlist: https://www.moonsift.com/landing
On top of that, we have an iOS app in the pipeline that leverages the same technology. You can try the beta here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universal-wishlist-by-moonsift/id1609475671
Sorry to Android users, we are hearing your requests too, but will need some more time.
We have not forgotten our ultimate aim either: making cross-retail product discovery truly effortless! Which we now realise is needed even more than we initially thought. Lots more to come as we re-imagine shopping online! This is just the beginning.
