When it comes to helping you shop, there is a plethora of Websites who want to help you, and learn about your consuming habits in the process. Smartshopit is one of those Websites. Created by Trent Wong, Smartshopit helps you build your grocery shopping list by indexing all the products available in stores near you.
Once the list is up, users can look up for cheaper prices of the same or similar product in the area. Smartshopit makes it really simple to build lists, look for cheaper items, and rate/tag/share any item. I find it a really handy tool if you want to build a list for somebody else to shop for you.
As of today, Smartshopit is still in development. Social features are available, but the population and its activity on the site isn’t sufficient to provide a compelling crowdsourced experience. Also, based on your shopping list, the service suggests a single-store report (the store that has most of the items on your list for the best price) or a comparison report (comparing stores), but again, the site lacks a deep well of data to give some depth to those reports.
I have a little suggestion for the development team of Smartshopit: Since the site is in development, I would recommend focusing on building tools that make it easy for early-adopters to provide tons of data to the site. For example, adding a retailer to the database is hardly accessible, whereas it should almost be on the homepage.
First, too many clicks to get to the ‘add retailer’ page: homepage, log in, search, retailers search, add retailer, bingo. Then, the form is not complicated, but it simply is too heavy and difficult-looking:
I would follow the example of RateItAll’s new site design: They over-simplified the creation of an item to review, which translates into a richer database that attracts a diverse crowd. I think an effort should be made to encourage retailers and early-adopters to provide content to the site.