HILLSBOROUGH – Got a shoe obsession, but not the budget to match?
A new local startup is working to help you build your shoe collection without going broke, by making your buck go further.
Enter Purcado – a newly launched shoe price-comparison site that allows users to search for the shoes they want and compare the prices against more than 100 retailers, and counting.
“As a sneakerhead, I spent copious amounts of time searching website after website for the best price on his favorite sneakers,” recounted Purcado’s founder and CEO Jeff Caudill from Hillsborough.
“As time went on, I began to realize that my collection was taking more and more time to build since new sneaker sites were born every day. I decided that there had to be a better way; and if there wasn’t, then I would create it.”
Purcado’s founder and CEO Jeff Caudill from Hillsborough.
So the 27-year-old bootstrapped his company and set out to build the most organized retail database, starting with shoes.
A major challenge
“One of the major challenges we faced is that there existed no known avenue to collect and organize mass data from multiple feeds as it pertains to retail,” he explained. “There has never been an efficient and formalized method in which each retailer presents their inventories, and no organized way to access that data and utilize it.”
Working with the Durham tech company, One Cow Standing, the team developed a platform capable of aggregating footwear inventories with virtually no point of reference.
The site is updated daily through product feeds provided to them from the retailers that they work with. Using a proprietary algorithm, it then matches products together across multiple stores, which are then featured on the website.
All the user has to do is search by brand, style or shoe, and up pops up the best deals across retailers.
“This was a new innovation and involved a great deal of trial and error to get it right,” said Caudill.
So far, the response has been strong, he added, estimating that users save an average of 25 percent off the retail price.
Ultimately, Purcado wants to change the way people shop online.
“Since we do not have to worry about inventory, we are able to focus our entire efforts on improving a user’s online shopping experience,” said Caudill. “We want to be a leader in innovation for online shopping.”
