App provides personal buying assistant to hunt down your items

Fetch's buying assistants will search for items sent in via text, voice memo, or photo, and then purchase the product on behalf of the requestor at the best price.

Buying online may be more convenient than a trip to the shops, but for many it’s still far from a pain-free process. While we’ve seen efforts such as Snap Fashion — which taps the crowds to locate where to buy clothing submitted in users’ photos — go some way towards cutting research time, our new spotting goes even further. Fetch is a personalized shopping app which will search for items sent in via text, voice memo, or photo, and then purchase the product on behalf of the requestor at the best price.

To purchase an item using Fetch, users first enter details of the product they are looking to buy, specifying brand, size, color, quantity and/or shipping speed. They then submit this information along with a photo of the product, or a voice memo, and confirm their shipping and billing information. Those with a rough idea of how much the item is going to cost can then simply select “Buy It Now” and sit back. At this point the request is received by Fetch, where a team of crowd-sourced professional shoppers will identify the product and hunt down the lowest price online — they’ll even check for coupon codes available. The Fetch team will then place the order on the users behalf. The more cautious, however, can first select “Find Best Price” to be notified of the best price available online — including shipping/taxes, and the estimated delivery date — before committing to making the purchase.

Users can add additional instructions before committing to “Buy Now”, and upon completion of the order they’ll receive an ecommerce receipt directly from the retailer. As well as having access to their account dashboard, where they can customize their shipping and billing info, Fetch users with Amazon Prime can also provide their Amazon credentials to authorize Fetch to place orders using their Amazon account. The app is available for both iOS and Android.

How else could crowd-sourced teams be used to make the shopping experience even more pain-free?