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The main scalability issue with this is that the products you've found will quickly go out of stock, so as you build up a collection of outfits you'll face an i
by richmarr 12y ago
The main scalability issue with this is that the products you've found will quickly go out of stock, so as you build up a collection of outfits you'll face an increasing burden going back and checking all of the products to see if they're in stock (or risk damaging your brand).
I worked on something similar back in 2008. We were looking at ways of monetising our visual similarity engine. We could mark a set of query products for each outfit and return a selection of products that were both similar and in-stock and give the customer the option of filtering by price range or whatever.
There were some nice challenges in there, like processing gigabytes of retailer feeds as rapidly as possible looking for new items, standardising various huge feeds without using up developer time, product deduplication, image feature extraction, designing the indexing method (we ended up using the Visual Words technique with a custom distributed Lucene inverted index as Solr didn't support partitions at the time). It was a really fun project... and I've drifted far enough off topic that I'm going to finish up.
The tech was pretty solid (and replicable if you can get someone decent to do the CBIR piece) but we ran out of runway.
- DaveLond 12y agoIsn't that problem self-solving? Who wants to dress like a celebrity dressed last season- you want what they're wearing this season. Keep it up to date, with what's "in" now. Disclaimer: I know nothing about fashion.
- tehwalrus 12y agoI think the stock would run out much faster than fashion would change. Also, there are probably 4 or 5 retailers selling similar items; you want your affiliate links to spread the load over those sites so as not to kill any of them quickly. Of course, all this assumes your site explodes and you help sell thousands of outfits per day; which sounds unlikely to programmers, but maybe not for the people who buy all those awful magazines that are more popular than Linux Voice.
- richmarr 12y agoYeah, stock turnover is much higher than trend duration. Any retailer that knowingly let stock last longer than trends would be burning their margin. Stock is measured in weeks or months but trends can last for years, and recur, and recur, and there's no value in an affiliate link to an out of stock product.
- jadlimcaco 12y agoGood point. I don't think it takes a fashionista to realize that, lol.
- jadlimcaco 12y agoGreat points! Thanks for taking the time for the feedback. We are already realizing the problems with constant price and stock changes. So, our focus now is to provide a great daily resource for those who visit the site and subscribe to the daily mailing list. Fashion, seasons, and clothes are constantly going out of style. Even if we did keep up with the prices and stock, some styles would eventually be irrelevant to our some of our community. Also, we have started adding profile pages for each featured celeb. On this page, you can see every outfit we have featured from that celeb. We think it will be neat to see how that particular celebrity's fashion evolves over time. Thanks again!