A handful of startups are groping around in the “social shopping” area, talking about making money from the 80% of online shopping time that is spent researching products rather than buying them.
The king of this space is CNET reviews, which combines editor reviews with lots of pictures and structured data with direct user reviews as well. In May Yahoo launched Yahoo Tech, directly targeting CNET Reviews as well. When I research products, I usually don’t go much further than these two sites (although I spend a lot of time on the gadget blogs trying to find out exactly what new stuff I intend to research). Of course, CNET and Yahoo Tech focus solely on technology gadgets.
Other services have launched in this space as well, generally focusing on wish lists, recommendation lists or both, and often giving users tools to put widgets with recommended or desired products up on their blogs or websites. See our posts on Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere and MyPickList. Wists is another site in this category, although we have not written about it yet. These sites expand well beyond technology in their product reviews.
These sites generate revenue from affiliate fees (via links to ecommerce sites) and/or via contextual advertising placed on the site, usually Google.
And now comes ThisNext, a Los Angeled based company with a NYT writeup as well as a thumbs up from Jason Calacanis (Jason used to work with the CEO, which may explain his mention of the product).
The site is the best I’ve seen so far, with clearly structured items and very easy ways for users to add their own opinion via comments, tagging, comment ratings and adding things to a wishlist. There are easy to find “buy” links if you want to purchase the item. Users can also create a website widget to show off the stuff they really like. Good stuff, well executed.
But I have never gotten that excited about sites like ThisNext and the others mentioned above. I don’t believe they will ever succeed in drawing customers away from big Internet brands like CNET and Yahoo, who are already doing a very good job of integrating user reviews with editorial reviews and content.
Neither the NYT or Jason mention that CNET is already out there and dominates this space for tech products. The NYT should have…writer Bob Tedeschi clearly intended to give ThisNext a positive review (complete with a picture of the CEO walking with a surfboard) but he never seems to be able to put his finger on why it’s so great.
Jason, however, nails it. He thinks ThisNext can be successful because it will show emerging trends in what consumers like.
It’s sort of like taking “The Tipping Point” concepts and making them into a product you can actually use. For example, as the community grows you’ll be able to see who recommended a product first. After some period of time you might be able to find the people who are good at finding–or creating–trends.
CNET doesn’t do this, they simply review products and put their reviews up on the site. They do not show how certain products become hot over time, and what people are good at picking winners.
This type of thing might find a niche – it won’t displace blogs that are dedicated to talking about the newest and greatest products in a given space, and they won’t displace the big review sites like CNET for people who want to find reviews on a product they already know about. But perhaps they can serve people who want to be a part of a community that decides what products are hot and which are not.
Am I excited? No. But I’m intruiged enough to write about this at 3:30 in the morning. Or maybe I’m not excited because it’s 3:30 in the morning. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.
There’s a site that I use that’s like a cross between delicious & (insert price comparison site here), a social price comparison site if you will.
http://www.dealtagger.com allows users to add products to a del.icio.us like list of products. The social element comes from the tags that users add, and the groups they assign them to.
You can also use it as a wishlist too, using triple tags (wishtagged, wish:occaision=birthday etc)
In the social shopping space you can find basically three categories of services:
* simple bookmarking services like Wists, Backpack, Kaboodle, etc.
* recommendation services with revenue sharing models like ThisNext, FavoriteThingz, MyPickList, etc.
* Shopping Services that make it easy for users to set up stores with their favorite items on their own sites, like Amazon (aStore), Chitika (Shoplinc), Goodstorm (MeCommerce), Zlio (ZlioShop)
Nearly all of the services in category 2 and 3 launched in the last few months, so I am definitely excited.
Well, there is 2 problems for social shopping that way :
1. There is no incentive for posting reviews (not fun, not particularly interesting…). And the incentive for people cannot be money either, beacuse the amounts you can get compare to the time it will take you is not enough.
2. Concerning Yahoo Tech and Cnet, it is only about technology… There is a lot of other stuff to talk about.
Social Shopping, collaborative shopping… Whatever you call it is a good idea. But not that way. it cannot be just a del.ici.us like.
Why isn’t this “Social Shopping” done in reverse?
I would think that some sort of “warning” about crap products with a user supported/popularity voting system would be more beneficial.
“80% of online shopping time that is spent researching products rather than buying them.”
Everyone researches before they buy. I’ve gotten screwed after the research as well. Most reviews found online are opinions formed in ideal circumstances. Real life is where most of us will be using these products/services. Real life has dirt, rain, hot, cold etc.
Thousands of “Reviewers” might have an impact on the quality of service/product.
I’ll shut up now.
I checked out the site and it looks like it has great potential. I was really put off by their “Shopcasting” page though. Makes them sound absolutely clueless about podcasting. Here’s what it says:
“Shopcasting? What’s that?
Well, you know what podcasting is. It’s making and sharing a playlist of songs you like.
Shopcasting is the same thing, only different. It’s a product playlist — a way to recommend to other people things that make life better…”
http://www.become.com/ is the best shopping site.
TheNext placed that story in the NYT, they got Jason and you to blog about it too.
As far as I know the company never contacted us, and I certainly never spoke to them. I saw Jason’s post and was intruiged. I saw the NYT article and was dissapointed in what they wrote. But all of this did make me think of the space a little more.
Wow, want a great site!
Web sites that exist sole on data those users provide is the core of Web 2.0. We have to stop underestimating the power of your voice.
Web 2.0 belongs to you !
As far as I know if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…..
Mike why don’t you just call this blog MoneyCrunch?
I love the random attacks.
I think you are saying that this company paid me to write about them and that it’s obvious from my post.
I think that the company would be requesting a refund if that was the case.
First off.. Mike, you do a great job here. Definitely the best editor TC has. I seriously doubt that your taking bribes, heh.
My problem with these types of sites is that the reviews I usually find arent very good. Too many non-tech people reviewing tech products. Reviews that say something along the lines of “that thing on the side is cool” isnt much of a review. Sure, sometimes I find good ones but usually the customers dont know what they are talking about.
Cnet and Yahoo on the other hand (usually) give great reviews. They play with the product and test all of its features and are paid to do so and since they are paid, they do it well. That usually gives me a better idea of how the product works.
#3. Nextmove is right, these sites may have excellent ideas, but there is no incentive for the people to write reviews and Cnet is tech-based, so I wont find much information about what baby carriage to buy.
If Yub.com (a failed Buy.com) idea is any indication, these sites will have it tough. When folks research for important buys, they research and visit multiple sites for product clues. When they impulse buy, they impulse buy and then it all comes down to traffic and depth. I feel these for-profit social network sites may be dominated by paid-for reviewers and flacks (the way StyleHive is) and won’t have cred.
I hope NextMove and all other product review companies are, or will be publishing their reviews as hReviews (see http://microfor...rg/wiki/hreview ). I believe Michael’s Edgeio already publishes and pings Pingerati (see http://pingerati.net/ ) with their microformatted data. Yahoo! Tech does the same thing. Others should follow suite.
Question:
Mike, could you provide a little bit more detail as to why ThisNext “won’t displace blogs that are dedicated to talking about the newest and greatest products in a given space”?
Are you making the argument that they are simply more specialized and can provide the rich expertise that bloggers desire?
My take would be that if ThisNext could somehow build a community of passionate “enthusiasts” (ie bloggers dedicated to the topic with some form of demonstrated expertise) either with revenue sharing or some other form, their search/”wisdom of crowds” functionality could add a nice layer of decision-aiding functionality for users on top of the bloggers opinions.
Thanks…
Question:
Mike, could you provide a little bit more detail as to why ThisNext “won’t displace blogs that are dedicated to talking about the newest and greatest products in a given space”?
Are you making the argument that they are simply more specialized and can provide the rich expertise that users desire?
My take would be that if ThisNext could somehow build a community of passionate “enthusiasts” (ie bloggers dedicated to the topic with some form of demonstrated expertise) either with revenue sharing or some other form, their search/”wisdom of crowds” functionality could add a nice layer of decision-aiding functionality for users on top of the bloggers opinions.
Thanks…
I think the main problem with these sites is that they solve a problem which doesn’t exist, and try to take an offhand thing (mentioning products) and turn it into consumer behavior. There simply aren’t enough people who are going to invest the time necessary to make this a success.
I’m not impressed. Three things:
1) What tells me that the Jason Calacanis of printers, or the Jason Calacanis or sneakers won’t go and ‘buy out’ the top 100 ThisNext users to guarantee good reviews on certain products? Nothing, that’s what, nor do I have any guarantee the CNET editors aren’t on someone’s bankroll either – but at least CNET is legally responsible for the content, ThisNext won’t be (”our users did it”).
2) People turn to the internet to look for info about products when they shop, but – at least in my case – I do it because I want to find info from people’s actual experience with the product. If people are satisfied they won’t post – it’s if they are dissatisfied that they will. What’s the motivation for posting positive reviews here? Getting your mug on the ‘top100 contributors’ list? People will end up reviewing for the sake of reviewing, not because they care about the products. Like the Amazon comments system, but worse.
3) Michael is right in complimenting the site for the pretty graphics and well designed interface. However, I gave it a shot trying to buy something I know about, so I chose ‘Laptops’ and got a list of laptop bags (?), and a single user which for all I know could be on Dell’s bankroll. I thought ‘well, maybe it’s not just a laptop-kinda-site’, so I searched for my cell phone, the htc universal. I received a list of books, remote controls and a bizarre “University of Santa Monica Graduate Programs in Spiritual Psychology”, which had apparently been recommended by the person who submitted it.
Even if they went beyond those limitations by adding more products and filtering out the spam, they’d have problem ‘a la’ digg or wikipedia where groups of users could ‘play the game right’ and influence the top recommended items, etc. And since we’re talking about shopping here, you’d have entire companies asking their employees to create profiles and ‘push’ their products.
Finally, they probably won’t do anything about point 1, 2 and 3 because it’s not in their interest to restrict the flow of reviews. Nuff’ said.
“TheNext placed that story in the NYT”
Um, would you care to tell me how to “place” a story in the NYT?
Yahoo and OMD conducted a study that found 12% of people read online customer reviews before making a purchase. Only 6% of people read Consumer Reports before doing the same. ThisNext will certainly provide a value to consumers, but whether it can be financially successful is suspect.
I, too, have to wonder about Michael’s claim that blogs will ultimately trump social shopping sites as mechanisms for discovering the newest products. Blogs are great for random discovery. Yes, techies subscribe to tech blogs and will always be up on the latest mp3 player. Foodies subscribe to food blogs and will know the newest kitchen knife. But what happens when a techie wants to buy a kitchen knife or a foodie’s looking for an mp3 player? They’re heading into uncharted blogosphere territory. A Technorati search? If you already know what you want, sure, it’s a great way to get more persepctive on it. But if all you know is “kitchen knives,” you’re gonna have to wade through tons of crap. Social shopping and other similar verticals move the starting line a lot farther along for shoppers.
The Next Now…
1. Send me a Dollar.
2. I’ll tell you what to buy.
…site is profitable and the purchasing decision is out of your hands.
Everyones happy!
i like http://www.productdose.com
they find interesting niche products and i enjoy their writing style
This isn’t new behaviour – people recommend products and ask opinions from friends all the time. Social shopping seems a better way of doing this online by allowing you to connect to 100’s of people at once and see what they suggest.
One site you didn’t mention was Crowdstorm (http://www.crowdstorm.com) which takes this a step further and works out how buzzy products are and lets people add / edit them into a big wiki.
The elephant in the room for ThisNext and their ilk is Amazon. Amazon owns the point of sale review which converts significantly higher than the destination site review.
They also own the world’s biggest and most effective affiliate program – Amazon Associates.
How long do you think it would take Amazon to turn on a shopcast Widget powered by their MILLIONS of reviews? And hook it into a Amazon Associates to do rev sharing with the reviewer?
If this concept of social shopping shows any legs at all (which it might), Amazon is going to come in and kick everybody’s ass.
Apple better do something soon because it can’t live off of the Ipod and newer versions of the Ipod forever. It’s time for Apple to come up with the next great thing.
Annoying. Annoying interface, annoying reviewers, and it also looks like a site for people who sit at home and spend money while their spouses are off making money. Who has the time to make a profile with a picture and become a known reviewer of consumer items on some stupid web site?
This is great if your spouse spends 12 hours a day at the office and your only job is to keep yourself off heroin and try not to cheat with the pool cleaner person. Or if you don’t have a career yet (could be a good thing these days) and have too much time on your hands. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.
I feel like I am late to the party here.
As ThisNext’s CEO, I wanted to follow up on some of the comments above.
FWIW, I also want to say thanks to everyone for taking the time to share their thoughts. Feedback is the only way we can make ThisNext a true success.
Let me start by describing how we think of ThisNext and what we see our market opportunity to be.
In brief, we think that more and more people are migrating/creating their identities online. As such, these people need tools/services to help them express themselves. MySpace and blogs are great platforms but they don’t do everything well. For example, Flickr has become the photo layer of many people’s digital identity. YouTube has become the video layer. Right now, the product-specific layer is pretty open. We intend to provide a vendor-neutral, bi-directional product-layer for tastemakers who want to express themselves thru (in part) their product selections.
We believe that the product layer needs to be owned by an independent company, one not beholden to any particular manufacturer or etailer. Lawrence Coburn above raises the question of Amazon and how they should be able to stomp all over ThisNext and its ilk. Theoretically, I suppose it is possible, but, as prior history has shown, it is highly unlikely. Many incumbents who “should” have owned a vertical have failed to do so online as markets either emerged or shifted. For Amazon to adopt a totally open, discovery-oriented network model w/links back to blogs (as opposed to their monolithic centralized model) seems like it would b e a difficult shift for them to make both organizationally and from a business perspective. That said, we think Amazon does a fantastic job of being an ecommerce platform and we certainly keep an eye on what they do. If you all have any ideas on how to exploit additional opportunities or weakenesses in Amazon’s position, I would certainly love to hear them.
A couple of reviewers (ie Next Move, Bryan, Ted, etc) have suggested that ThisNext endeavours to solve a non-existant problem which nobody will be motivated to work on/contribute to.
While I agree that contributor motivations are a key consideration and agree w/Greg’s and Chris’ comments above, I have to respectfully (but not unexpectedly) disagree. Both our nascent community and the well-established/well-documented behaviours of product mavens in the real-world show that many people like to be regarded as experts or enthusiasts in their areas of interest. People contribute to their digital identity because of the social capital it earns them. Now, it is true that social capital is more existential than financial, but social capital has largely powered the blogosphere and, I suspect, the comments on TechCrunch. I go more into this topic of identity and consumption on my blog: http://gordon.b...o-flying-seeds/
(Ted, btw, if you want to find a baby-stroller, several have been recommended on ThisNext (http://www.this...rch/?q=stroller) and you can also check out the “Mobility” list of the guy who designed the cadillac of strollers, the Bugaboo (http://www.this...y/maxbarenbrug/))
Per Stephan’s comments about keeping motivations as pure as possible and our tech to date. On motivations: we know that not everyone will want to trust the wisdom of the crowd/net but figure that the behaviour of asking trusted sources their opinions is a well-established one offline. So we look to bring it online. Some people will undoubtedly try to game the system and we have spent a lot of time thinking about how that might happen. I would certainly love to chat if you have any additional ideas on how to safeguard/maximize the quality of our recommendations. On the Tech front: we are constantly refining our discovery algorithms but have been focused principally on launching and social architectures to date. Again, any further feedback here would be appreciated.
Lastly, what’s with the ridiculous accusations about buying off the NY Times and TechCruch? Both are respected publications and I strongly doubt either would be for sale. If you don’t trust the editorial, why do you bother to read it?
In any event, I encourage all of you to check out ThisNext. Also, please feel free to email me directly (gordon at thisnext dot com) or IM me (upoc01 on AIM).
I look forward to hearing from you all.
There are two aspects to look at here.
One, when I have a chosen product in mind, I’m looking for others’ experience with that product. Two, when I’m browsing for a type of product (i.e I’m looking for a neat gift for this occasion) I want suggested products pushed to me.
For example, check out http://www.classymommy.com where it’s a bit of blog/product finder mix – with a decent AJAX interface sprinkled on top. It’s got subjective opinion mixed with faceted classification. (I actually came across it from the thisnext blog – http://blog.thi...lassymommy.html)
The companies mentioned fill different voids in their users’ worlds. All of the big companies mentioned in this blog fall down hard when it comes to keeping up with the pace of technology innovation. CNET reviews are frequently incredibly stale – months, occasionally even a year or more – and I imagine the same is true for the Yahoo service. User reviews on sites like Amazon are somewhat useful in overcoming this, however they suffer from tremendous sample size and adverse selection problems (sample size as in, you only bought one, and adverse selection as in, you hated it so you were motivated to write a nasty review).
ThisNext and Kaboodle, in particular, solve the problem of making the most current and expert product information easily accessible by creating platforms where knowledgable people – frequently more expert than the professional reviewers – can put their thoughts and prove their credibility. This is especially important in a world where even professional reviewers cannot keep up with the pace of innovation.
While the functionality of the two sites is markedly different, I think they will eventually converge on the same point (social network-type ability to see what your friends like, dislike, etc., with a sub-group of experts on various subjects). ThisNext has more of a self-expressive tone to it, where hipsters can prove their hipness. Kaboodle is more functional, in my opinion, where roommates can post comments on each others’ choice for kitchen furniture, stero, or what have you.
In the end, however, it is about disintermediating information by taking the professional editor – the intermediary – out of the equation, and enabling direct expert-to-inquirer contact. As the world becomes increasingly segmented and varied – with products designed and marketed to extremely small subsets of the population – such disintermediation will be necessary, because editorializing will become uneconomical for all but the largest purchases. And because society will place a value on this new, more democratic, type of expert, I think it’ll be only a short time before there are ways for experts to monetise their expertise.
Gordon, I may not have been clear in making my point because, ultimately, I think sites like yours can have some success here. But Lawrence is right to bring up Amazon. Of course if everyone who worried about Google or Amazon eating their lunch, there would be no more tech startups…ever. As for paying off the NYT, as a former journalist I can tell you that cleverly-pitched stories will get covered more quickly than poorly-pitched but inherently more interesting ones everytime. Oh, and even if ed. space in the Times were for sale, I guarantee you it would be at a price beyond ThisNext’s means.
I should have been more clear, Greg. You were right on in pointing out the issues around discovery across categories where the shopper is not an expert themselves. The most common real-world heuristic when faced w/picking a product in an areas where the buyer does not have huge domain knowledge is NOT to go out and do exhaustive research, particularly on more aesthetic or lifestyle products (as opposed to a very quantitative product like a mortgage). IOW, people ask others they trust for guidance to save themselves time and reduce the likelihood of making an error. ThisNext aims to provide that same service but scale it across the net, not just be limited to people you know.
When I said I disagreed, I was referencing Ted, Bryan, et al’s comments about people not being motivated to make product recommendations. Blogging has shown that people go to great lengths to simply express themselves to a peer group that is relevant to them. While it is true, we want to make it as simple as possible to get recommendations in, we also want people to have to do some thinkning about what they submit otherwise garbage in/garbage out.
And your point is well-taken about Amazon, Google, etc. We need to be nimble, focused on areas where they are weak or do not compete, and look for ways to align interests.
Lastly, I must be a good BS-er as you are right, ThisNext def could not afford to buy the NY Times.
. More seriously, the underlying story around the smart social shopping plays is really the revolution of brand marketing online. That is a HUGE story for much of the business world.
Recommendation sites DON’T have to reward their content creators. In a lot of cases these content creators are trying to create goodwill with shoppers because the content creators have web businesses of their own that they would like the shoppers to find and buy from. Free reviews enables the reviewer to seem altruistic and the shopper will be more inclined to learn more about the reviewer compared to when the reviewer is a hired gun. Plus, rewards can have an opposite effect if the site pays too little, not too mention the maintenance required in the reward system… and keeping it fair… and detracting people trying to game the system.
Shopcasting has gotten a bad rap for being poorly named on a few blogs and comments, but I think its a smart term. The end customer of this product is a shopper who does not speak “widget”, but instead needs a fashionable term. Besides podcasting is proven so why not ride that wave.
Also, impressive management background.
Future features:
1)shopcasting my favorite members’ picks, shopcasting my wishlist (I was told this was coming).
2)Embedding a ChaCha/Quno like Q&A service where I broadcast what I am looking for to all reviewers I have tagged as my favorite reviewers. There could be monetization in this scenario / premium account. This fixed the “apartmenttherapy” complex…Apartment Therapy is a great blog suggesting cool products, but communication/recommendations across the readership is limited to desolate comments on blog posts.
future features are my requests, not necessarily coming.
this is all shit
Hi webmaster!