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November 1, 2006

Ugenie Crunches Shopping Numbers

Marshall Kirkpatrick

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Ugenie is a new online shopping aggregator developed by two former Amazon executives. Most shopping sites that come along bore me to tears but this one is fascinating. The site considers how much each item would cost, bought individually or in combination with your other items, at 35 different online market places. If you are searching 35 vendors for 3 items, then that’s 35^3 combinations - or 42,875 permutations. The service can handle bundles of up to 15 items.

More than just metasearch, Ugenie searches the vendors in real time and ranks them based on bottomline prices that take into consideration shipping, taxes and any coupons that can be found online. If you are likely to save more money by buying another item the site thinks you will like, it will recommend a bundle with those items included. It then takes you step by step through purchasing your items from various sites offering the best deals. The UI alone gives the site a feeling of legitimacy that too many shopping search sites lack.

Ugenie was built by Krishna Motukuri, co-founded Amazon India, former Senior Program Manager at Amazon Harish Abbott and Yahoo! India founder Bharat Vijay. The company received $5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures this summer.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 1:01 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. pick!t

    November 1st, 2006 at 2:34 am

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  4. Next Intuit » Strategic Assessment of Ugenie.com

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  7. Ugenie in a blog » Blog Archive » Surge of traffic

    November 3rd, 2006 at 2:09 pm

  8. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » PriceFight: Because There’s More to Shopping Than Low Prices

    November 17th, 2006 at 11:53 am

  9. TechCrunch en français » PriceFight: parce qu’il y a plus important que le prix d’un produit

    November 19th, 2006 at 7:32 am

  10. PriceFight: Because There’s More to Shopping Than Low Prices

    November 19th, 2006 at 9:44 am

  11. PriceFight: Because There’s More to Shopping Than Low Prices » JenIT

    November 21st, 2006 at 4:31 am

  12. Compare book prices — Web20 approach (Poll) at ProBargainHunter.com

    January 15th, 2007 at 2:34 am

  13. ugenie launches iread and socialwizards- mid course correction..or? |Technology and Business Startups in India

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Comments

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  1. Startups.in/India

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:04 am

    Few really good finds since yesterday. :) Likely an acquisition target by Amazon or may be good ol’ Goog.

  2. SHeywood

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:38 am

    This company appears to be the truth. I had been waiting to purchase a copy of Danny Meyer’s new book called “Setting the Table” about how he sucessfully infused his principles on hospitality into all of his restaurant concepts over the last two decades. The book retailed for $25 at Barnes & Nobles. I almost purchased it when I was in Boston, but I was short on cash at the time. About a week later, a friend forwarded me the ugenie link and I was able to purchase the same book for $14. I actually went ahead and purchased 2 copies - one for me and the other for my business partner. Now if I could have the same experience purchasing a BMW on Ugenie, I would be in heaven man.

  3. John Anderson

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:41 am

    I like the niche. Perfect for books - where deals are random and shipping gets expensive. I used them in the past for a group of textbooks, and it worked well..

  4. Startups.in/India

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:58 am

    Are they related to http://www.textbookgenie.com in anyway? Looks similar.

  5. ex-amazonian

    November 1st, 2006 at 3:16 am

    Relevant link: There is an interesting podcast interview with one of the founders: Harish Abbott by India’s Podcaster Kamla Bhatt at http://kamlabhatt.com

  6. Amit Gupta

    November 1st, 2006 at 3:53 am

    Apart from the friendly user interface, I enjoyed the ability to sort the thousands of results by the click of a check box; the filters related to shipping cost, choice of vendor and coupons are unique and extremely useful. Also, bundling of items saves the hasstle of ordering items from different websites and the associated follow-up issues. Fantastic and Friendly site!

  7. Chris

    November 1st, 2006 at 7:57 am

    “Are they related to http://www.textbookgenie.com in anyway? Looks similar.”

    Yep. textbookgenie now has the following message:

    “We are taking textbookgenie offline for our usual off-season makeover. But, this time, we’ll be back sooner than you’d expect, with a much better UI and a lot bigger catalog that covers all books, cds, dvds, and videogames. See for yourself at ugenie.com, our new flagship website that uses the powerful bundle search engine you have come to love, and adds many cool features such as tagging products and bundles, customizing the bundle pricer, and dozens more merchants. Textbookgenie will be re-launched on the ugenie platform and will have all the powerful features of ugenie in addition to course listings from many more schools.”

  8. NeoTechie

    November 1st, 2006 at 8:26 am

    Wow. Great Site.

  9. DarkMatter

    November 1st, 2006 at 8:57 am

    Nice site, but I don’t see a business there. Affiliate business model doesn’t work for large companies. The merchant benefits and it does generate some revenue, but it’s not large enough to build a whole business around it.

    Alot of you might read about a guy who made $1,000,000 from eBay per month via its affiliate program, but he’s spending $600,000 in marketing. This is a one man operation and it didn’t even last that long.

    So the affiliate is great for 1 or 2 man operation. But a $5 million venture operation with CEO and VPs mouth to feed? Nah, not going to last long.

    Unless they have some secret revenue generating scheme that we don’t know about, but I doubt it.

  10. M.

    November 1st, 2006 at 9:14 am

    Seems like a good idea, but the site is very slow. Any bundle with more than a couple of items is taking *ages* to calculate, and I’ve given up. Might be due to a sudden surge of traffic, so I’ll try again later.

  11. chakpak

    November 1st, 2006 at 10:26 am

    Referral as such may be not such a great business. But it seems to me that value proposition of ugenie is not in referaal, but in helping finding customer true price, or the bundles. The success depends how well they can execute on former, and how well customers percieve the latter(bundles). To me both of these look nice idea and should generate value and hence business …

  12. DarkMatter

    November 1st, 2006 at 10:44 am

    Hmm.. Providing value to customer isn’t always equals to a business model. Didn’t we learn that from web 1.0?

    I mean if I am giving free icecream to customer I’m adding value to the customer. But as for operating a business?? where is the business in that? where’s the revenue? How are they generating revenue?

    Great value != revenue… and that’s the point I’m trying to get across.

    I wish them luck…

  13. awardtour

    November 1st, 2006 at 11:24 am

    So I guess it doesn’t calculate free shipping with amazon? I bundled 3 books by Michael Lewis together and the best combination it gave me was ordering 2 books from overstock and and 1 from half.com at $37.41. The same bundle on Amazon was $34.63 with free shipping.

  14. Patricia

    November 1st, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    It’s a good idea but I shop ALOT and I know the apparel/retail market extremely well - so far, no service I’ve seen come to market actually pulls from the sites people are shopping on.

    Amazon owns one of them - http://www.shopbop.com - so maybe they will get it. I’ll be checking it out!

  15. Harish

    November 1st, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    Hello awardtour,

    Thanks for using ugenie. Our algorithms should include all the price breaks including Amazon’s free shipping. Can you tell me the the three books in your bundle ( you can also email (help at ugenie dot com)) so that we can look into what went wrong. This is a either a special case or you may have either discovered a bug (in that case we will have a special prize for you).

    Thanks for your feedback and support.

    -harish

  16. Jo

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:02 pm

    I think it is interesting but does not have mass appeal…it is a fairly small, nice to have feature for a comparison shopping engine that may want to diversify its product but I don’t see this as a real differentiator…

    Marshall, I know you dont find this space terribly interesting but I think offering deeper price/tax/shipping info like ShopWiki (www.shopwiki.com) is much cooler since you never see the Gap or many other popular stores at shopzilla or yahoo shopping. I also think companies like DealMine.com (www.dealmine.com) that feature additional content like discounts and rewards from national membership/rewards programs make their search results more differentiated and do have more mass appeal…

  17. Eric

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:28 pm

    I spot a trend.

    First Impression

    Ugenie certain did something right, they didn’t litter their front page with useless comments about being the best, the most fun, or the cheapest. Instead, they tell you exactly what you’re suppose to do on their site.

    Their search is limited to books, music, movies, and games which is great and should stay that way. I decided to test out their system, with books in my amazon cart I haven’t purchased yet. Amazingly, it works. Well, not perfectly, Amazon already does a pretty good job of having the lowest prices. Hopefully Ugenie can bring them down even more.

    I will have to admit tho, unlike other pages that load instantly, Ugenie mines the data for you on the spot. For some reason, I actually feel a bit excited as I anticipate what the engine will reveal to me. I think this engine is definitely worth checking out. The only problem is that retailers have not adopted the bundling of like-products, so it doesn’t produce a significant amount of savings.

    Read the complete Strategic Assessment at the Next Intuit Blog

    http://www.nextintuit.com

  18. Rohin Dhar

    November 1st, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    I used this product during the alpha test and found it ridiculously useful in instances when I need to make block purchases. For example, buying 5 textbooks at the beginning of the school term or buying a handful of CDs to refresh the music collection. I imagine some folks could just type in their christmas shopping list and be done!

    Ugenie could probably do some neat partnerships with websites that allow people to keep lists of things they want or their favorite CDs and books, etc. Just a thought.

  19. Yakov Shafranovich

    November 1st, 2006 at 2:33 pm

    I don’t think there is a viable business model here. My company tried to launch basically the same product 6 years ago in 2000 and we pulled out after realizing that it doesn’t really make that much money of affiliate comissions.

    Another thing is that they are claiming patents on their technology. Prior art already exists.

  20. dave

    November 1st, 2006 at 2:43 pm

    no business model? are you kidding? if these guys can show me a way to save 10 percent consistently, then i’m happy to give them a slice of the savings, perhaps up to 1 quarter of my own savings…just a thought. this could be a killer for stock supplies, office crap, peripherals, etc…seems like a much better tool for SMB than consumer….

  21. Mansi Kamdar

    November 1st, 2006 at 3:25 pm

    A user friendly interface and a pleasant feel when navigating through the website, other comparison shopping websites get you stuck thinking where next to go. Didn’t feel the same on this one. Amazing to see the way it crunches through millions of combinations to get the best deals allowing you to exclude merchants. I tested it my self and trust me they indeed came up with the best deals.

    I really liked the fact it’s one site that does all the rebates and coupons calculations saving you the trouble and time. I guess once they convince the user of this fact, they are on way to go. Bundling was also a different feature which saves you both money and time to go to other places to shop. On the whole would say the website satisfies a shoppers appetite for good deals.

  22. Bill Parker

    November 1st, 2006 at 5:33 pm

    PriceGrabber.com already offers the ability to 1) bundle items by one merchant and 2) view the total cost (w / shipping and taxes). If you use the Shopping List feature, you can get something a screen like the URL below, where you can compare products bought individually vs bundled by one seller:

    http://www.pricegrabber.com/bo.....84824%5d=M

  23. rnelson

    November 1st, 2006 at 6:58 pm

    This is interesting. I tried a few of my favorite books - but mostly, it shows Amazon.com marketplace as the best price. Does this mean that there isn’t much price difference/choice for buying books?

  24. Matt

    November 1st, 2006 at 7:38 pm

    I just tried with two of my favorite books:

    Atlas Shrugged (ISBN: 0452011876)
    The Fountainhead (ISBN: 0451191153)
    Ugenie came up with $11.55
    The Fountainhead : $4.84 (Amazon Marketplace)
    Atlas Shrugged : $6.71 (Half.com)

    I tried the same combo with an old comparison site that also uses feeds called http://www.bigwords.com/
    Bigwords.com came up with $11.54
    Atlas Shrugged: $3.46
    The Fountainhead: $1.58
    S&H: $5.04

    I like ugenie UI but I don’t know if someone who is deal conscious can be swayed with nice UI - especially if the savings aren’t great or in this case none at all.

    I find Ugenie approach an incremental improvement over what is already there like bigwords.com
    In fact if I looked at savings, no improvement at all.

    Matt

  25. Harish

    November 1st, 2006 at 7:58 pm

    Matt,

    Thanks for trying out ugenie and I am glad you liked the UI.

    I just ran your two favorite book bundle just to see if we have messed up some how.

    http://www.ugenie.com/displayB.....dleId=4162

    I got the ugenie find of 11.54. It is not $11.55 as you reported ( atleast as of now 18:50 PST) and they both are sourced from half.com and not from Amazon and Half . We do real time price checks so it is likely that when you checked the best price was 11.55 and sourcing was as you reported.

    Yours is a great point that points out to the dynamic nature of pricing in media products. And since we try to have very fresh prices what we suggest is what you will end up paying - trying to take the guessing out. Also, for some bundles you may not find great savings (as in this case) over other sites but for some you may find a whole lot more. We are just trying to find the best prices available for your pick of items at the time you want them.

    -harish

  26. James Carter III

    November 2nd, 2006 at 1:54 am

    I was quite sceptical about Ugenie, but given the great review here and the fact that I needed 5 titles (my daughter is hooked on some children’s books about fairies by Daisy Medows) I thought I would try them. I was surprised they did find me a lower price than amazon by 84c. (Amazon 29.94 and Ugenie 29.06). Unfortunately I have had great service from amazon and so I just stuck to Amazon.

    I think going up against amazon on books that are popular is fairly pointless. Even on books like the ones I was looking for, which are not best sellers the difference is not big. So I doubt that Ugenie will something I will remember in the days to come.

    But I like rooting for the underdog, however fruitless, so maybe I will come back sometime.

    Also guys you need to reduce the number of clicks to buy a bundle. Buying a bundle of 5 involves 5 clicks to create the list, 1 to bundle, 5 to go to the site that was selling the book, 5 add to cart at the site, 5 windows to close and then the checkout. At Amazon I had 5 clicks on one page and then checkout.

  27. Nachi

    November 2nd, 2006 at 2:36 am

    awardtour,

    thanks for trying the ugenie. the items for which you were trying to buy the amazon price (with free shipping) from ugenie comes out to be $39.94. thats why ugenie did not come out with amazon as the cheapest for the bundle you were trying. we verified the amazon price to be correct also. we would love to hear from you on how you could get 34.63 from amazon for this items. as harish meant earlier if its something we missed we would definitely fix it.

    - nachi

  28. Krishna

    November 2nd, 2006 at 3:04 am

    James - thanks for trying out our website and posting your findings here. We are certainly working on reducing the number of clicks users have to do on the final purchase guide page and are hopeful to have something out in the next few weeks.

    As far as comparing Ugenie prices with Amazon goes, we have received feedback ranging from “not much difference” to “wow, I saved 70%”. The value of ugenie to the customers on both sides of the spectrum is that we take the guess work out of answering whether your favorite merchant is cheapest or not. You can use the filter criteria to see exactly how much more expensive that merchant is compared to the cheapest option (use the “All from one merchant” checkbox and exclude merchants you don’t want). You, the user, decide whether the price difference is large enough for you to switch merchants (may be this one time) or not.

    We love to hear from our users. Please drop us a line at http://www.ugenie.com/feedback.jsp.

  29. Sandra

    November 2nd, 2006 at 10:38 am

    I’m a big Amazon.com fan. Love their service! So, when I heard about Amazon alums having come up with this cool service, I gave it a try. I tried two books I am thinking of buying today: ‘Fiasco’ and ‘The Audacity of Hope’.

    Ugenie gave me the following prices:
    Amazon: $30.70
    Overstock: $30.30

    That just confirmed what I knew all along - Amazon is THE place to buy books. You can save a penny or two elsewhere if you are into penny pinching.

    Based on some of the comments here, regarding there being a spectrum, I thought I’d try some older books which may have better prices elsewhere because they are not hot so Amazon wouldn’t be offering big discounts. I’m a big Agatha Christie fan so I just picked two that I don’t own:

    The A.B.C. Murders 042513024X
    Nemesis 0451200187

    Ugenie came back with Amazon Marketplace for $7.00

    I think I love my Amazon on the entire spectrum.

    Good luck guys! The site is nice and pleasing to the eyes though.

    -Sandra

  30. Chris

    November 2nd, 2006 at 11:17 am

    Maybe I am dumb but why do you need to search through trillions of combinations. If you are looking for new books, check at Amazon, Half.com and Overstock. If you are looking for used ones, check at Amazon, Half.com and Alibris. I think that will cover 90% of your cases. Atleast that is what I’m seeing in most of my bundle searches.
    And I think comparing against list price is a bit over the top.

  31. James Carter III

    November 2nd, 2006 at 1:05 pm

    Chris:

    Your observations match mine. Even if it isn’t broadly true right now, it is fairly unlikely that Amazon, Ebay, Alibris and Half, which are probably the most efficient channels for selling books, will yield their customers to others.

    But I would love to be proven wrong.

    Sunil

  32. Shan

    November 2nd, 2006 at 7:44 pm

    Finally, a comparison shopping site that caters to both men and women! Most of the comparison shopping sites I have tried seem to be so completely targeted towards men (in UI and content) that I had almost given up. It appears Ugenie actually gets what people want - the product combinations I want, from vendors I have heard of, at the lowest price and highest quality possible. I don’t want to investigate every option possible, I just want what I want, asap. Nice work ugenie for getting that. I’ll be back, again, and again.

  33. Ajit

    November 3rd, 2006 at 2:11 am

    Chris and James Carter III , you guys are talking about visiting three sites to get the best prices for a new book (Amazon, Half.com and Overstock) or a used book (Amazon, Half.com and Alibris). You would end up visiting 4 websites in case you are not sure about buying a new or used book. uGenie will find the best deal for you including shipping,taxes and coupons in one place in one click! If you are buying for more than one item then you would end up wasting a lot of your time and energy in figuring out the best deal if you dont take the help of genie i.e. ugenie :). Try it, its all free! It saves so much of your time and effort. Isn’t that cool? :)

  34. Prem

    November 3rd, 2006 at 9:56 am

    Chris, No you are not dumb :) but remember, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Would you agree or not that even with 4 places (Amazon, Half.com, Overstock and Alibris), uGenie is offering value to you? And all this is free!! uGenie does not charge you a penny. I agree with you that showing savings compared to list prices is over the top but hey, as long as we are getting savings for free, I’d always give uGenie a try!

  35. Mona

    November 3rd, 2006 at 10:51 am

    Ajit:

    Not to put words in their mouth, but I interpretted Chris and John as pointing out that if you simplified the technology behind uGenie to search just a few places you would get results that were not a whole lot different than if your searched many more.

    If this were true, it would beg the question, is the Ugenie in the bottle big enough for a venture investment. They seem to make a big deal and also take a fair amount of time searching something.

  36. Kumi

    November 9th, 2006 at 3:16 am

    This thing is flipping amazing. I decided to try this out for myself based off of a referral from my friend and it is great. I bought 3 books and a book on cd. I priced my “bundle” had I just purchased everything from Amazon vs. Ugenie, and I ended up saving about $25!
    That’s incredible.
    I’m a raving fan of this site, and Ugenie is one of the major reasons all of my family will be getting books, dvds, and cds this Christmas.

  37. Rose

    February 6th, 2007 at 9:00 am

    Its a good site, especialy for those of us who still pay for our music, but for textbook shopping it is a bit cluttered. I prefer to use more streamline search engines like Textbook411.com or even gettextbooks. Overall its a good site to have bookmarked.

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