Saturday, June 22, 2013

Website Favorite || Stalkthis

A couple of months ago I was watching makeup videos on YouTube (as I tend to do), and I stumbled across a video by Chloe Morello in which she gives the lowdown on a new Pinterest-like website: www.stalkthis.com. You can watch the video here; it includes a well-done tutorial on how to use the website, so I'm not going to get into that in this post. Basically, Stalkthis is similar to Pinterest in that you are tagging pictures of things and saving them to your profile, which you can look back on later.

The big difference is that Stalkthis was created for the purpose of tagging products you're looking to buy but that might cost a tad more than you're willing to pay. Stalkthis keeps track of the prices of the products you've "stalked" and sends you email alerts when they go on sale or drop in price. As you can see from the picture above, it also keeps track of the alerts on the website itself. You can even sort the items you're stalking into categories As a penny-pinching college student,  Stalkthis has already helped me save money on a couple of clothing items, which is why I like it.


But!

Stalkthis is still in beta form, meaning that its creators are still working out some kinks in the website (that's what beta means to my understanding, at least). I've definitely noticed some major glitches which make use of the site less enjoyable, so I hope those get worked out in the future. Here's a list of some of the major/most annoying ones that I've noticed:
  • Stalkthis forgets what you bought. I find this to be the #1 most irritating glitch on Stalkthis. What happens is this: After you buy an item, you can edit it on the site to say "Got It" over the picture, as I've done with that awesome Hindu-inspired elephant T-shirt (see above). I like this function because then you can come back to your account later and look at all the things you bought and it just makes me happy for some reason. The problem is, after a couple of days, if you log back into Stalkthis the "Got It" banner disappears. For a while I kept re-clicking the "Purchased" button to make the banner re-appear but now I just delete the item for the most part. Disappointing. 
  • Certain product pictures don't load on the site. Again, if you look at the screen shot above, you an see that I tagged something on beautybay.com...but the picture just doesn't load on Stalkthis. I'm not sure why this is, but it annoys me to no end and I have to delete those pictures too. (FYI: The product I tagged was Alpha H Liquid Gold, which you can buy here.)
  • The "Category" button in the Stalk toolbar doesn't work. To be fair, this has only happened to me in Safari and only happens sometimes. But it's annoying because if you want to categorize an item, you have to log into the actual Stalkthis website and edit from there, instead of categorizing from the "Stalk" toolbar, which is more convenient.
Hopefully this blog post didn't get too too technical and nitpick-y. The bottom line is that I really like Stalkthis.com because it helps me keep track of things I want in a fun, visual way, and most importantly saves me some cash. 

2 comments:

  1. Hi Erin,

    Huge thanks for your comments and feedback (good and bad). It's really helpful to hear your Stalkthis experiences as it's the only way we can fine tune the site during the Beta stage.

    What you are experiencing with products on BeautyBay.com is something we've been working on trying to fix for a while now. It's a technical challenge we're still trying to resolve! Hang in there we'll crack it eventually!

    The other two issues we didn't know about, so thanks for raising those.

    If you want to make contact or find any other bugs, please let me know through 'give us feedback' and we'll jump on it.

    Thanks again.

    Fredi
    Co-founder
    Stalkthis.com

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  2. No problem! I do really love the website, it's really helpful and fun to use!

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