blippy, swipely and weshop are the startups that work on an interesting concept - sharing buyers purchase information to other users. This concept has potential as buyers would like to find out how much others have spent on an item before purchasing it. Earlier buyers have to make their purchase decisions based on information provided by shopping sites. Buyer purchase information provides the complete picture - price at which others are buying an item and advertised price of that item on shopping sites.
Building huge corpora of buyers purchasing habits and gaining user confidence are two major challenges faced by these start ups.
Building huge corpora of buyers purchasing habits is the major obstacle these sites have to cross. If there are very few purchases information then these sites are of no use. I have looked at blippy and weshop; as of now their search capabilities and corpora is very limited. I could not find purchases like: iphone, ipad, fisher-price toys etc on blippy and weshop doesnt provide search functionality.
As of now these sites require users to provide their credit card information. I guess these sites need the credit card information to gather buyer's purchase information. Being a paranoid, I will never share my credit card information to these sites unless they become as reputed as amazon.com. I have no idea on how many of their users will share their credit card information to these sites. These companies should come up with a better way of gathering buyer's purchase information.
They can provide an option of uploading the purchase information. But, there should be an incentive to the user for uploading his purchase information. Some options could be provide redeemable points for every purchase entry, provide tips/deals that are of interest to the user or provide utility applications to track his monthly purchases.
I think this concept is more suited for verticals which provide buyer purchase information specific to a field - like: auto mobiles, flight tickets, real estate etc. These verticals will be more focused and there is higher probability of users providing their purchase information.
