Barbadians who’ve burned a Saturday driving from store to store, or given up and ordered from Amazon, have a new option. Yuh Gettin’ Tru?, a free search site built in Barbados by software developer Matt Hamilton, lets shoppers type in what they need and see which local businesses carry it, with prices in Barbados dollars.
The idea came from a camera memory card. A friend of Hamilton’s needed a high-speed SD card, couldn’t work out who sold one on the island, and ordered it online with 2 weeks of shipping. A shop about 10 minutes away had one on the shelf the whole time.
The site now indexes more than 480,000 products and services from over 125 stores, plus more than 2,000 local vendors, refreshed daily. Results run from cordless drills and patio furniture to cheddar cheese, car rentals and nail technicians, and they can be filtered by price and stock. People are using it, too. Hamilton reports more than 1,000 searches a day, with 22% of searches ending in a click through to a store.
The name comes from the question every Bajan shop clerk asks, roughly “Are you finding what you need?” The search is built to understand how people actually talk, including Bajan, US and UK product terms. Type “cutlery” and it finds the shop that calls it “flatware.” Type “soft shoes” and sneakers come up.
Local businesses can get listed for free by submitting their Instagram profile, which the team reviews before it goes live. Those who want to show up first can buy a sponsored spot at the top of relevant searches for BBD 30 per week, clearly labelled as sponsored.
The site says plainly that it’s still in beta. Prices can be a day old, some products may be missing, and shoppers are told to confirm price and stock on the store’s own website before heading out.
Hamilton moved to Barbados from the UK in August 2021 on the Welcome Stamp visa, after a software career that included IBM, Ripple and Protocol Labs. Since arriving, he’s built a string of Barbados-first tools, including Yuh Hear Dem, which makes parliamentary debates searchable, and We Outside 246, an events finder. He was also part of the launch team for the government’s alpha.gov.bb services portal. On the Yuh Gettin’ Tru? site, he sums up the pitch in 2 sentences. “Google searches the internet. This searches the island.”
Yuh Gettin’ Tru? is live now at yuhgettintru.com, where businesses can also submit a listing or book an advert.
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Stephen Stanberry
