Unbox With Shoeboxed

If you are feeling boxed in by consumer culture, ShoeBoxed is certainly not here to help you buy less stuff. What Shoeboxed does is create a "social shopping" network. It is kind of like shopping online with all the extra peer pressure of high school. Shoeboxed was recently featured on the front page of TechCrunch, and we thought we'd see what it was all about.

Sign up and use of Shoeboxed is free. It took only a few moments to get an account going and start exploring.  Right away Shoeboxed encourages the consumer spirit by announcing that it has bestowed upon you "5 Items Free".  At first, even I got excited, non-shopper that I am, thinking it was some kind of giveaway. It's no giveaway, however. Shoeboxed just wants you to brag about some of your recent purchases "without needing a receipt".

After you have uploaded your 5 Free Items, Showeboxed jumps to your item display page, where you see your items and the photos you uploaded, sorted by price.  You then have the option of adding more items, thus bragging more to the Internet about your shopping prowess, uploading or scanning in receipt images, or looking at what "stuff" other people have.

All I could think of the entire time I played around with Shoeboxed was George Carlin's stand up routine about "stuff" (warning: some language).  In the routine he makes fun of having too much stuff, needing to take stuff with you when you travel, needing a bigger house to buy more stuff, and on and on.  This seems like a site built to encourage people to buy, buy, buy.

The strangest feature of the site, to me, is definitely the receipt uploading tab.  You can use your scanner to scan in a photo of your receipt hard copies then upload it to Shoeboxed. You can also upload the receipt files you get via email in online shopping, or use their interactive receipt uploader to get the information in there. Shoeboxed then seems to sort your receipts by items and stores, offering you a chance to make items public or private.

As someone who shops online far more than off, I already sort my email receipts by store and by card used on my own computer, in a nice, neat little folder with subfolders.  I also receive a fully itemized statement from the card company and bank each month, listing the details of all purchases, which gets filed in its own place.  That gives me back up of my purchase records times three.  When I buy from a brick and mortar store, tha receipt gets put into the card file immediately. 

The purpose of the Shoeboxed receipt sorter seems to be to "keep your receipts all in one place".  If you are like most people, you already do that. That makes this aspect of Shoeboxed redundant, in my opinion.  I must admit that it also makes me a little nervous - each time you scan in a receipt you are also scanning in your personal information, including your card information at most stores.  Unless the person using Shoeboxed knows how to prevent that from happening, you take a chance at putting yourself at risk. 

To find fellow Shoeboxed users, you click the tab that says "Their Stuff". That displays… other people's stuff.  I suppose you can make new friends based on what you have or what you want to have at that point. Either way, friendships based on acquisition seem a little shallow to me.  At least on networks like MySpace and FaceBook you get the chance to find people who share your interests, your history or who live in  your area, for example.  On Shoeboxed you get to make friends with everyone else who bought the Baby Bjorn Back Pack System.

Shoeboxed was started by a group of college students out of Duke University in North Carolina.  I give them every credit for writing and executing a beautiful, simple Web 2.0 social network interface with uploading features and photos that works flawlessly.  One of the few Web 2.0 sites I've used that worked without a hitch, Shoeboxed is simple and attractive in appearance.  It wasn't very useful for me, personally, but if you are a shop-a-holic or spend a lot of time losing receipts, I can see where you'd like it.  You will also like it if you want to meet people who won't roll their eyes at you when you talk about that great deal you got on those Prada shoes.