The results for Black Friday are in and it appears that at least to some degree, the economy is beginning to rebound. At least people are shopping at levels that haven’t been seen in a few years and that is giving quite a few retailers some extremely positive projections for the rest of the holiday season. Wal-Mart, for one is not taking any chances and has taken quite a few different steps in order to make sure shoppers come to their door, but physical and online.
Wal-Mart started their holiday shopping season by releasing a new iPad app that allows people to shop with ease on their tablet and upgrading their iPhone app. The retail giant also offered some of the hottest Black Friday deals of anyone, with video game aficionados getting big time hookups. Now Wal-Mart is going to extra mile with an all new Facebook app called Shopycat.
The Shopycat app uses some pretty detailed algorithms to determine a Facebook user’s top 10 friends. Once the list of top 10 friends is calculated, the app will suggest to the user what they should get these friends. Apparently the gift list is calculated by using data that those friends have entered on Facebook. The app will also take into account different apps or sections of Facebook they have visited.
While the app is a nice little gimmick, don’t expect it to pull out some incredible guess from thin air. Shopycat will take into account if your friends talk about a certain movie an awful lot. Since most people already own a movie they talk about enough in order to be noticed, the app will offer up to 10 different suggestions per friend on the list.
Wal-Mart has jumped into the 21st century with the launch of @Walmartlabs which is dedicated to coming up with high tech gadgets and apps for the company. Shopycat is one of the first apps that this new endeavor has come up with. While Shopycat may be the first of its kind, it shouldn’t be too long before you see most of Wal-Mart’s competitors launching similar applications.
Edited by
Jennifer Russell