1 blank cheque, 2 unusual co-founders: here’s how this Tinder-like shopping app came to be

With ecommerce companies like Tokopedia and Alibaba seeing big bucks in 2014, the competition is heating up rapidly, and correspondingly, many big brands are also trying to join the party by building their online presence. Unfortunately, their idea of competing online often ends up going something like this: setting up a Facebook page and Twitter account, buying some advertisements on Google, and creating their own mobile app.

On the receiving end, consumers end up having to contend with a mess of store apps on their smartphone screens. Chief marketer and co-founder of online store aggregator app Shoppr Sylvia Yin and her college friends realized this about a year ago when they found themselves “downloading many apps which took up screen space and memory.”

To make things worse, these apps were just plain bad. Yin compares the user experience as akin to having an insistent sales assistant follow you around in a store. “In the same way, we didn’t want an app which constantly tries to push us products to buy,” she says. “Most of the time, we just want to window browse.”

With this in mind, founder Kendrick Wong decided to pull a team together to create a “light and fun” shopping app catered to the masses.

The Tinder of shopping

Shoppr draws heavily from dating app Tinder’s swipe-to-discover methodology. Once you have logged in via Facebook, the app uses what Yin calls “a social clustering algorithm” to show you the products you might like based on your page likes and personal bio. Thereafter, it’s a simple matter of swiping left if you like it, and right if you don’t, a la Tinder.

“The more they swipe, the better our recommendations get as we attach attributes to each products and get a better sense of what they want at what time of the day,” Yin elaborates.

Users are also able to search and buy whatever they want directly via the app, which means no more time wasted being re-directed to the respective brands’ stores to checkout. Notifications whenever any discounts are released by brands also mean that users will never miss out on a good deal.

According to Yin, their target market consists of tech-savvy females aged 18 to 32. “They are fashion forward, trendy, and love browsing and purchasing clothes online,” she explains. “They are familiar with sourcing outfit inspiration from mobile apps such as Instagram. Mobile phones play a huge part in their life – from simple everyday tasks like deciding which restaurant to dine in to researching a product before purchasing.”

The journey so far