Where2Buy: A Location-Based Shopping App with Products-wise Searching

It is usual for a consumer to search a product based on its category and go to related kind of shop to buy a product, e.g. food in supermarket, a pencil from a stationary shop and etc. While it is not uncommon nowadays for a shop to sell various categories of goods at the same time, like a newspaper stand do sell toys, an accessory shop has stationary. However, consumer may not easily notice and purchase these goods, especially if they are in hurry or not familiar with the shops nearby. With the emergence and popularity of many shopping search engines (shopbots), we can actually provide a better matching between the consumer and seller. In this paper, we developed a shopbot app system (Where2Buy) on smartphone that can search and filter the nearby shops which sell the desired products. To simplify the input process, our system allows users to search by text or voice and fuzzy matching is supported to widen the scope of searching. Detailed information of related product and shops are displayed in the result, together with a navigation map showing the best route to the target shops. If the desired product is not available nearby, substitutes in the same category will be recommended for the users. Our user study evidences that our system is simply and easy to use. More than half of the participants prefer Where2Buy than the other available shopbots in Hong Kong.