PocketShop: iPhone Shopping App
The Challenge:
In November of 2008, before the release of Amazon.com's own app, iPhone users had to search Amazon using a mobile website in Safari. This interface was slow, unintuitive and incomplete. Simple price checks were tedious, and hard cover and audio editions of books were difficult to find.
The Solution:
To fill the need for a fast, complete Amazon search tool, Samutech developed PocketShop and gave it away for free in the iTunes App Store. PocketShop is a native iPhone app, eliminating the extra steps of starting up a browser and entering a URL. In addition to the basic search and display of products from the Amazon catalog, it's features include an in-app shopping cart, which can be easily emailed for later checkout. One of PocketShop's main advantages over the Amazon mobile website is the way it handles various editions of the same title. All editions are returned, including hard cover, audio books and Kindle editions.
PocketShop's superior search results are achieved by the creation of an intermediary web service that sits between the iPhone app and Amazon's Affiliate Web Services API. This web service manipulates and expands Amazon's initial results to ensure a complete record of various book editions. This service also handles the emailing of individual items and shopping carts.
Unfortunately, despite the popularity of PocketShop, and despite the thousands of dollars of Amazon products that had been bought through the app, Amazon.com sent us a cease and desist order on December 23, 2008. We were required to remove the app from the App Store and can no longer make it available to the public.
Technologies Used
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Objective-C
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iPhone SDK
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CakePHP
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Amazon Affiliate Web Service
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PHP
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MySQL
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