Tech Review: Lyst

I love trying out new companies that combine retail, fashion, and technology. One of these companies is Lyst. Basically, Lyst is a social shopping site. You can follow designers, boutiques, or bloggers to see their style. You can also create your own lists (it reminds me of Pinterest in that way). Within Lyst, you can click on any items to purchase. You can also connect Lyst to your Pinterest account and get notified when those items go on sale. Pretty smart.

What I like: I like being able to tag items that I'm interesting in and retain the pricing information, retailer, etc. It's also very friendly to bloggers. If you have a blog and want to connect your blog to your Lyst- they make it very easy to download the html for the widget. Then, you can go directly to Lyst and see how many referrals you've generated. If someone (that was referred to Lyst by your blog) buys an item that you've tagged on Lyst, then Lyst offers a commission for these resulting sales. This is very smart and useful. I've added one of these Lyst buttons to my blog (see link on the left of this page). Let me know what you think- is it annoying, useful, distracting?

What I don't like: The items available to tag are limited. You can't just tag anything you want from any retailer. The item has to already be included in Lyst. I found this to be very limiting. For example, they have partnerships with specific retailers (like JCrew). But, when I searched for a specific JCrew top, it wasn't there. They had some other JCrew tops, but not the one I was looking for, which meant that I couldn't add it to my list. I don't know what dictates which items are included in Lyst. Maybe it's items for which JCrew has excess inventory? Either way, it's very limiting.
Also, Lyst indicates that you can connect to your Pinterest account. I think this is genius. I'm supposed to get notified via Lyst when something I've pinned goes on sale (if it's from a retailer that partners with Lyst already). That has yet to happen and I've had my Lyst account for several months. Obviously, they have bugs to work out but if they can do it, this could be a great way to shop.