Around here, we’re endlessly fascinated by the wide world of online shopping, and it seems that every week brings with it a brand-new e-commerce site to be obsessed with. Since keeping track of ‘em all can be a feat of epic proportion, we’ve decided to feature “A Site To See” each week, highlighting a cool retail website you’ll definitely want to bookmark. This week: an incredibly useful new site called Hukkster.com.
Why You Should Bookmark Hukkster: While we know you’re just as thankful for e-mail sale newsletters as we are, the sheer volume of the deals hitting your inbox has probably become largely unmanageable. Whether it’s an end-of-season sale notification, a coupon code, or a friends and family deal, e-mails often get lost in the shuffle, and amazing designer deals get left by the wayside. That’s why Katie Finnegan and Erica Bell—two retail obsessives who met while working as merchandisers at J.Crew—founded Hukkster a year ago to solve this very problem.
“We’re very passionate about retail, but honestly shopping for normal consumers is pretty inefficient,” Bell told us, when asked about what inspired the initial idea for the site. “Between the daily deals, the flash sales, promotions from our favorite brands—there was just too much to sort though. We were overwhelmed by the whole process.”
“We try to take all the dirty work out of shopping,” added Finnegan. “Hukkster is the equivalent of a personal concierge online. We really filled the hole for ourselves; because we’re shoppers and love retail, every product decision we make is aiming to be easy for that working woman or busy mom who doesn’t have time to sift through all the noise herself.”
How It Works: The goal of Hukkster—which, by the way, is a free service—is to let you know the instant one of your coveted products goes on sale.
“Hukkster is a little widget that lives up in your browser, similar to the Pin It button,” Bell says. “You just go about your normal shopping activities online. When you see something you’re interested in, but you’re not ready to pull out your credit card and buy it, you click the ‘Hukk It’ button and we save all the information for you, right down to the size and color. The moment there’s a sale, we’ll let you know in real time via push notification, e-mail, text message, whatever you prefer.”
As of right now, more than 85,000 people are signed up to use the service, and the site has partnerships with more than 2,000 brands, including Nordstrom, Shopbop, Target, Macy’s, J.Crew, Bloomingdale’s, and more. “We add more and more stores every day,” Finnegan said. “Theory is in the works right now, as well as Lord & Taylor. We let our community decide what brands they’re interested in.”
Fun Fact: The widget’s name comes from the term huckster. “A huckster is someone who would go door to door selling wares and making deals,” Bell explains. “We revamped the spelling and we like to say we’re the modern-day huckster, bringing deals to your doorstep.”
Check it out: Hukkster.com
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