Dive Brief:
- Scratch, an web and mobile app that offers shopping recommendations from live experts, has raised $3.6 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and others.
- To use the app, the shopper sends a short message outlining his or her needs; a Scratch expert receives the message and promises to reply within 24 hours.
- Scratch offers click-to-buy functionalities on all recommendations, as well as a competitive prices and a 30-day “Best Price Promise” guarantee.
Dive Insight:
Personal shopper app Scratch has raised $3.6 million in funding to help it deliver expert shopping advice to more consumers. Users can click to buy anything from Scratch’s recommendations or its curated lists directly, and the app holds payment information and shipping addresses to streamline transactions.
The app reminds users of upcoming events such as birthdays and anniversaries, and will incorporate information from usage histories based on personal interactions with its shopper assistants—an unusual offering in the days of sophisticated algorithms and machine learning.
Facebook, however, is reportedly developing a similarly human-powered shopping recommendation service for its Messenger app, code-named Moneypenny after James Bond’s assistant. The competition for these kinds of services seems to be heating up.
