When shopping meta-search engine Mpire launched their Firefox shopping plugin last year we felt it was one of the best shopping tools to come out in a while. Today, Mpire is offering the plugin for IE7, upgraded their site and launched the newly established Mpire Lab’s first product, a visual shopping site called Shopwave. Mpire is also working with Electric Sheep and Linden Lab to integrate their shopping experience into SecondLife and on an Apollo version that will carry out automated shopping searches.
The revamped site features a cleaner layout along with the same Farecast-style price tracking of the old one, but now includes Amazon and Epinion reviews along with coupons and deals embedded in the search results. The new Shopwave site is a work in progress that tackles the lack of innovation going on in online shopping visualization. We’ve talked about a couple new visualization ideas before. Mpire’s Shopwave doesn’t have as extreme a layout as BrowseGood’s treemap visualization, or as customizable as Like.com’s color and shape driven engine. It instead takes a window shopping approach, where you know what category you want, but maybe not the exact product. If you don’t know exactly how to describe what you’re looking for, Mpire’s new image previews may be worth the thousand words you can’t find.
See all
Post
i tried it out - i’m not impressed, at least not enough to switch
the only thing that’s cool abut this site is the price trend graph - and even then, it’s not that accurate.
i tested it out for a certain swiss watch co. ‘daytona’ model..it’s fairly accurate
i tested it out for a german sportscar ‘turbo’ model…it was off by$50K
bottom line for me: it’s only so and so
I’ve been using Mpire for quite a while and I really like this shopping site. Even prior to this new release, I have used it quite a bit. I really like the close partnerships with the other sites, I can always find a good deal, and now with the reviews mashup element, I can see what other people think of the products I’m looking at.
The flash is apparently too large for my screen. Some items are cut off on the bottom, and you can’t scroll to them without using multiple “focus on this product” widgets. Otherwise, interesting.
not impressed at all. there is nothing here worth mentioning.
i’m very close to this market and have been for quite some time. i’m shocked to see such a disappointment come out of Mpire.
from a user experience level it doesn’t add any value or stand out as unique from a functional perspective.
i hope ebay didn’t contribute to this.
http://www.mpire.com/research/ebayPop.ivk from Mpire for eBay is slightly better and does serve some value
A much better implementation is at: http://www.CrispyShop.com, which is probably the coolest of all visual shopping sites. At CrispyShop we visualize 50 products at once by their price, features and popularity.
Group digital cameras by megapixels and: “Hey I can get this 10 megapixels Sony digital camera for lower price than this 5 megapixels from Sony…”
For soft goods, browsegoods.com is probably the best; for products where features are important, CrispyShop.com is by far the best one.
ebay is also working with apollo - cant wait until someone gives me rss keyword subscription visualization for ebay auctions on the desktop.