New York based ShopWiki is announcing $6.2 million in new funding today from VC firm Generation Partners. I wrote about ShopWiki at the end of last month and it’s got an impressive feature set – including wiki style buying guides, user generated video reviews and a cool search by color function. The new financial backing will power a multi-year plan for international expansion, marketing and usability improvements. The company plans to target five countries outside the US in the second half of this year and twenty-five in 2007.
ShopWiki was founded in 2005 by Eliot Horowitz, former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan and DoubleClick Co-founder and former CTO Dwight Merriman.
I like ShopWiki’s features, but after initially writing a glowing review I’ve given the service some more use and thought. I’m concerned that the feature set, though innovative, is too incoherent. Wiki buying guides are cool, though I’m not sure how widely adopted they are likely to be. Searching by color for clothes and home decorations is impressive, but doesn’t seem very related to wikis. Paying users to submit video reviews is interesting, but seems like something entirely different still.
Perhaps some day we’ll look back at this funding announcement and think that nothing could be more natural than a shopping wiki. If that’s to happen, though, I think the company is going to need to use some of its new found support to develop a more coherent offering that makes sense to users.
Is it a requirement that to own a Wiki you must first design a crappy logo?
I would love to know how it is legal for these guys to spider 1000s of e-commerce stores for product images, info and user reviews.
I like the whole concept of ShopWiki and the whole idea of ’social shopping’, but I still find http://www.dealtagger.com a really useful site when comparing prices of products your are actually shopping for, or for products might be on some small site that doesn’t get spidered by the bigger players. Dealtagger allows you to create your own personal price comparison site, well worth a look next time your researching prices.
There is new Web2.0 social shopping community which combines Ben’s Bargains and Digg.
http://www.dealspl.us
I really like its AJAX features.
Marshall, I think it’s great for you to take a step back on your glowingness of your review here. Personally, I have a policy of pointing out where my inspiration comes from…
http://www.dead...nline-shopping/
Adrian,
That’s my #1 concern for Shopwiki. How can they legally publish copywrited product photos? Especially with all of the problems between NetEnforcers and Amazon’s affiliates. NetEnforcers is going after affiliates with Cease & Desist notices even though they are tied to Amazon by contract to use the marketing materials. Shopwiki has no contract allowing them use of this information so they have no recourse when they do receive their Cease & Desists. Companies like Sony, Crutchfield, LG, and Mitsubishi who actively enforce their brand are going to give ShopWiki hell when they finally discover what’s going on.
As far as the “neat” shop by color functionality, yes it looks cool, BUT… In categories such as apparel, where this functionality is (theoretically) really useful, it falls short because it is only pulling the hex color from the image they are spidering… However, as we all know, a lot of pieces of clothing come in multiple colors and only one image is being pulled per item, so you can search for the color in the picture, but not for all colors in which an item is available… So in reality, this is a feature with some cool factor, but not ultimately very useful…
One would think they would apply the wiki approach to their lack luster product specifications.
there are some digg style websites: agentb.com, dealigg.com