Of course it requires a critical mass of people reporting before it becomes widely useful, and thinking cynically, I could see people "InStock-bombing" their local store - saying it's out of everything - in hopes of driving people away and keeping it for themselves.
But if you've solved both of those problems and/or found them not to be problems, I think this could be really helpful
Edit: Also, I just tried to search for it on the App Store by "InStock" (what it's called on the website), and it didn't come up. Then I searched for "whats in stock" and I think the one that came up (named "WhatsInStock") is this one, based on the screenshots. I think greater consistency would probably result in greater discoverability and trust.
Edit 2: I just opened it up and the nearby stores it found didn't include HEB, which is the most common grocer in my region (Texas), nor Whole Foods nor H-Mart. And while there isn't one close by, if it doesn't have HEB it probably doesn't have Central Market either. Just fyi.
I think it's safe to assume that the majority of users are good actors. With that in mind, the two main attacks that these sorts of crowdsourcing apps need to figure counterattacks for are:
1. Minimizing the damage an individual can do. This is usually pretty easy to solve. InStock has the issue that a unique item could be said to be out of stock, and not have any other users report otherwise for a while.
2. Minimizing the damage that a coordinated group effort can do. This can be difficult to solve. The attackers will likely succeed for a while; you'd need a system in place to detect anomalies (or at worst, rely on users to report the issue) and a weighted scoring system (20 brand new users shouldn't sway what an active 6 month account says, etc).
I've yet to see TP come back in stock at my local grocer during my trips, so I hope this project succeeds.
I hear you on the cynacism. We'll just have to see what happens.
Regarding the app store name, thanks for that feedback. We couldn't use InStock unfortunately since it was already taken, but we'll definitely think about this.
Regarding the store search results, we are using an api for this and this is quickly floating to the top of our backlog as something to work on for the next release. Thanks for the feedback on this as well, as it helps us prioritize the things that really matter to people. :)
I hear you on this. I actually am an Android guy myself. Android is on it's way, and we've talked about adding a web version too. it's a bit tricky since we have some feature ideas we have could be tough to implement via a web app.
We don't really have one. We may never have one. We just knew there was a real problem here.
If the app merely helps people get what they need and get home sooner (away from the virus) and doesn't cost us a fortune to maintain, then that's ok with us. If there's a business to build around the app, that'd be great too.
This needs crowdsourced data with extremely short shelf life (if you pardon the pun).
I don’t understand how this will ever work unless you find a more automatic way to get the data. Some ideas:
- Cooperate with the grocery store, and integrate with their existing inventory systems.
- Build the app around a smart shopping list. Automatically suggest the nearest store that is most likely to have everything on my list in stock. For any items I’ve added but didn’t check off after I left the store, report it automatically as not available, to build up the database.
2 and 3 are unlikely, most in store inventory and ordering systems are quite antiquated, not easily integrating with modern web technology, they also do not monitor things like shrink and shelf misplacement. Working with a large grocer, the best method for in stock is sales analysis.
I've done multiple POS data integration products with retail sales and inventory data and have thought about the backend of this sort of app before. #2 is doable, the main problem is that every retailer has different systems. But it can be done with enough capital.
How the heck are you able to get this data? I called the local store (Fred Myer) and they say they don't know they wait until the truck arrives and then they see what they get.
I am curious how you will deal with this problem: lets say I am at the store using InStock, and then someone takes the last package of chicken. So, I report there is no chicken. Another user approaches and also reports there is no chicken, so there must be no chicken! After we both leave, the stock boy comes and replenishes the chicken.
Probably nothing really. It will work a while for frequently out of stock items when the app has a small number of users. This replaces text messaging to let others know what's in stock.
But with many users, notifying other people will just make the store run out of stock sooner. So people will revert to texting their friends to let them know when something's in stock.
I'm curious what would be motivating here, too. Of all times to dilly dally in a grocery store, now's not the time. I want to get in and get out to reduce exposure time--not spend time updating an app with what I see on a shelf.
Awesome. About 8 years ago I was on vacation in Concan, Tx on the Frio river. There are maybe 3 stores in the area and then 3 roads out of town that each have a couple stores 10-15 miles away. I needed diapers. I didnt care what brand, I just needed some diapers. I imagined a similar idea wherein a person could search for "diapers" "beer" "charcoal" or whatever and find the closest item.
Thanks for the feedback! We think it's a neat idea too. My partner and I both had similar stories. In fact, when he started to describe his story, I knew how it ended and I just said, "I'm in. Let's build it."
A better method would be to have reservation only items, or even just a sign up sheet and distribution. As the concept of people following hot tips and traveling to en mass to various locations around the city will almost certainly exacerbate the spread. If the majority of people are good enough to use the system for it's intended purpose, then they can maybe also just not hoard items others may need.
Awesome intentions behind the idea, but I've got to be realistic: how on earth are you going to motivate enough people to report on availability?
I'm a huge fan of crowdsourcing, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the math works out even remotely here. It's very, very different from Waze in this aspect.
The math works out very, very differently for traffic conditions than it does for store availability. With traffic conditions, with a full road of traffic, if even only a couple percent of people have Waze, and then even only a couple percent of those report an accident, for example, you can still be fairly confident the accident occurred.
With stores that have thousands of products, and the app is only useful based on it's accuracy for each individual product, you need many, many more people reporting because their reports are spread over so many products.
TBH, I don't think this idea is workable, mainly because for the most in-demand items where you want a service like this, the inventory changes by the minute. I mean, whole aisles of toilet paper can easily be cleared out in 10 minutes even when purchases are limited to one package per customer. It takes me 10 mins to drive to the nearest grocery store.
Or they could just do online ordering and curbside pickup. Then availability is online and updated by the in store system. And social distance is ensured
My local grocery stores have pretty much killed that. You might be able to get a pickup window some time 8-10 days from now, but they will straight up cancel all of the high demand items like toilet paper.
If only this were usable. I’ve been trying for weeks now and either havent been able to get a time slot or anything actually in stock despite the website saying.
We had a similar idea, but didn't follow through. Here are some non-obvious use cases that you may find interesting
- Price comparison for the same item at different local stores
- Localized demand estimation for brands
- Referrals for items not available in the traditional distribution model (eg. Organic/Handmade goods)
One thing that would be helpful to me is to get a list of the re-stocking times for my local stores. I know that my local City Target gets restocked at 11am every day. And that a Walgreens down the street gets restocked on Tue and Fri nights so Wed/Sat mornings are when to get in line early to get some of the tough-to-find goods. This could be crowd-sourced like the rest of the app or an appointed business owner could be verified or introduce a superuser/moderator role for people to get karma based off of verified submissions.
I tried it briefly. Please tune the location algorithm to let me pick a nearby store. I live in the city and it detected a bunch of one-off corner stores but did not search broadly enough to find any actual grocery stores even major ones just a few miles away.
My local news has done something similar with storm pins. Storm pins is an app people used to post pictures and videos of interesting weather events, and, gas and water during a hurricane.
They've enabled things like toilet paper and sanitizer in the app. It's been pretty good.
Interesting how this kind of app will be most useful if everyone uses the same app. In which case there is perfect market transparency (well, regarding availability only in this case) and perfect centralization.
Of course, this is still individuals contributing, and so it's not exactly central planning, but it does go to show that centralized organization of available goods is quite helpful in a crisis situation, simply because it is more efficient. Especially in this crisis, where inefficiency (wandering around town trying to find stuff) is in direct conflict with the best remedy (social distancing).
And we're happy that it exists. :) Hopefully, more people working on this will mean people spent less time exposed at grocery stores.
FWIW, we may pursue a web version of the app, but we do have some feature ideas that could be difficult to implement as a web app, so we'll have to see. :)
shameless plug...we made something very similar... covidneeds.com ... just a bunch of volunteers ..we've put this up over a weekend trying to help... very basic.. sorry, if I shouldn't be posting about it here...
Maybe it could also let you specify "old person hours" at your nearby stores?
And does it let you specify a thing you're looking for? (like 151 proof alcohol)
I think the best way to get this off the ground is to pick 1 community and really push it there, to try out how useful it can be. Then use that one as an example.
Maybe you should look into reaching out to grocery store people and adding it. Plus in the app there's no way to report duplicates or add stores (Costco for example doesn't show up).
it would have been somewhat would be useful if you could tie into inventory systems like brickseek, or directly from online grocers/amazon-wholefoods/instacart.
but... during this time, even those systems are unreliable so i cant imagine this being of much use as of now.
good point. we agree that this would be useful, even if the information isn't perfect.
you're exactly right to point out that the information isn't perfect, by the way. I was just at a store earlier doing some personal shopping and I noticed they had employees counting the items because their inventory system wasn't reliable.
If this were to take off and maintain popularity past the COVID crisis, you could start showing trends to identify when stores receive shipments, restock their shelves, etc.
During the crisis, I don't see many people clicking "I Can Help", but it would be interesting if you could find a way to solve that. Gamification as others have said, might help, but not sure.
It would be interesting InstaCart shoppers, etc, could adopt this as a way to drive more business for themselves. If they're already out shopping and can identify high-demand items are in stock, a would-be buyer could procure it pretty quickly by starting an order with that Insta-shopper. I haven't thought through that, but it's an idea.
I could also see uploading, emailing InstaCart receipts. You could grep in-stock/out-ouf-stock information from those and timestamp it based on when the shopping was done.
> they had employees counting the items because their inventory system wasn't reliable.
That's just the normal way to do inventory, and has no real relationship to the reliability of the inventory system. There's no other way to account for inventory shrinkage (eg. theft, damage).
just downloaded and unfortunately there’s a bug that list the same 10 stores like 10 times. so i was scrolling forever just to get to the bottom where it told me “Unfortunately, no one knows what’s in stock there.”
Apologies for the tone, I understand that it didn't fit with the guidelines. But, to me, the idea behind the app seems blatantly morally wrong.
We should not be encouraging people to either converge on the one grocery store that has the thing that everyone wants. We should not be encouraging people to go to multiple stores to get everything on our shopping list.
This is a disaster, we've got to make some concessions.
At the same time, we should also avoid people going from store to store until they find a store that has what they are looking for. Which this helps with.
And my point is that many people want to avoid to "buy substitutes or go without", regardless of us thinking it would be a good idea, and some will avoid it by visiting more stores if they can't find out beforehand where to go, so helping people avoiding it is not necessarily a bad thing.
But if you've solved both of those problems and/or found them not to be problems, I think this could be really helpful
Edit: Also, I just tried to search for it on the App Store by "InStock" (what it's called on the website), and it didn't come up. Then I searched for "whats in stock" and I think the one that came up (named "WhatsInStock") is this one, based on the screenshots. I think greater consistency would probably result in greater discoverability and trust.
Edit 2: I just opened it up and the nearby stores it found didn't include HEB, which is the most common grocer in my region (Texas), nor Whole Foods nor H-Mart. And while there isn't one close by, if it doesn't have HEB it probably doesn't have Central Market either. Just fyi.
1. Minimizing the damage an individual can do. This is usually pretty easy to solve. InStock has the issue that a unique item could be said to be out of stock, and not have any other users report otherwise for a while.
2. Minimizing the damage that a coordinated group effort can do. This can be difficult to solve. The attackers will likely succeed for a while; you'd need a system in place to detect anomalies (or at worst, rely on users to report the issue) and a weighted scoring system (20 brand new users shouldn't sway what an active 6 month account says, etc).
I've yet to see TP come back in stock at my local grocer during my trips, so I hope this project succeeds.
Regarding the app store name, thanks for that feedback. We couldn't use InStock unfortunately since it was already taken, but we'll definitely think about this.
Regarding the store search results, we are using an api for this and this is quickly floating to the top of our backlog as something to work on for the next release. Thanks for the feedback on this as well, as it helps us prioritize the things that really matter to people. :)
Understandable; one solution would be to adopt the App Store name as the new "real name" and put it on your website, etc.
> Thanks for the feedback on this as well, as it helps us prioritize the things that really matter to people. :)
Sure thing! Best of luck.
OP should def contact the founder of Milo (whose now a VC) for ideas on scaling, monetization, features etc
1. https://www.instok.org
I hear you on this. I actually am an Android guy myself. Android is on it's way, and we've talked about adding a web version too. it's a bit tricky since we have some feature ideas we have could be tough to implement via a web app.
If the app merely helps people get what they need and get home sooner (away from the virus) and doesn't cost us a fortune to maintain, then that's ok with us. If there's a business to build around the app, that'd be great too.
I don’t understand how this will ever work unless you find a more automatic way to get the data. Some ideas:
- Cooperate with the grocery store, and integrate with their existing inventory systems.
- Build the app around a smart shopping list. Automatically suggest the nearest store that is most likely to have everything on my list in stock. For any items I’ve added but didn’t check off after I left the store, report it automatically as not available, to build up the database.
- Something something AR?
- track what users are searching for in an area (e.g. toilet paper)
- use GPS to determine who is at a store nearby that hasn't had that item updated recently
- prompt the user via notification with something like "Does [grocery store you're in] have toilet paper in stock?"
Admittedly it's not motivating anyone to answer, but it might help to keep data fresh.
But with many users, notifying other people will just make the store run out of stock sooner. So people will revert to texting their friends to let them know when something's in stock.
Glad to see it has come to exist.
I'm a huge fan of crowdsourcing, but I'm having a hard time seeing how the math works out even remotely here. It's very, very different from Waze in this aspect.
With stores that have thousands of products, and the app is only useful based on it's accuracy for each individual product, you need many, many more people reporting because their reports are spread over so many products.
TBH, I don't think this idea is workable, mainly because for the most in-demand items where you want a service like this, the inventory changes by the minute. I mean, whole aisles of toilet paper can easily be cleared out in 10 minutes even when purchases are limited to one package per customer. It takes me 10 mins to drive to the nearest grocery store.
- Price comparison for the same item at different local stores - Localized demand estimation for brands - Referrals for items not available in the traditional distribution model (eg. Organic/Handmade goods)
They've enabled things like toilet paper and sanitizer in the app. It's been pretty good.
And we're happy that it exists. :) Hopefully, more people working on this will mean people spent less time exposed at grocery stores.
FWIW, we may pursue a web version of the app, but we do have some feature ideas that could be difficult to implement as a web app, so we'll have to see. :)
I think the best way to get this off the ground is to pick 1 community and really push it there, to try out how useful it can be. Then use that one as an example.
You're right that the functionality is limited right now. Allowing people to see more stores is one of the first things we want to work on next. :)
Requesting updates about particular stores is my favorite idea here. We had a similar one: requesting updates about a particular item. :)
but... during this time, even those systems are unreliable so i cant imagine this being of much use as of now.
you're exactly right to point out that the information isn't perfect, by the way. I was just at a store earlier doing some personal shopping and I noticed they had employees counting the items because their inventory system wasn't reliable.
During the crisis, I don't see many people clicking "I Can Help", but it would be interesting if you could find a way to solve that. Gamification as others have said, might help, but not sure.
It would be interesting InstaCart shoppers, etc, could adopt this as a way to drive more business for themselves. If they're already out shopping and can identify high-demand items are in stock, a would-be buyer could procure it pretty quickly by starting an order with that Insta-shopper. I haven't thought through that, but it's an idea.
I could also see uploading, emailing InstaCart receipts. You could grep in-stock/out-ouf-stock information from those and timestamp it based on when the shopping was done.
That's just the normal way to do inventory, and has no real relationship to the reliability of the inventory system. There's no other way to account for inventory shrinkage (eg. theft, damage).
I love the concept though.
Please notice this, also, from the overall site guidelines:
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We should not be encouraging people to either converge on the one grocery store that has the thing that everyone wants. We should not be encouraging people to go to multiple stores to get everything on our shopping list.
This is a disaster, we've got to make some concessions.
https://whatsinstock.app/privacy