I’ve rarely thought about how to make online shopping better. I’ve kind of just gone to a website, done a few searches, and bought what looked like a good fit. Sadly, this doesn’t work for complex devices like cameras and laptops — anything with more than one or two identifying characteristics — and, as a result customers often have to go to brick and mortar stores to look at devices before we seal the deal online.
UK-based AnswerOil is an attempt to improve this process considerably by by offering a slider-based search system. What does that mean? You begin by selecting a category — cameras, laptops, milking machines — and then choosing a pre-set number of characteristics — megapixels, processors, memory, teat connections — or selecting less popular characteristics like color or size. You then prioritize and “weight” these characteristics according to importance. All of the changes are performed dynamically, allowing perfect matches to bubble to the top and less interesting devices to fall in ranking. There is a complete demo here which really shows the sliders in action.
Nice idea . cool UI but nothing earth shaking about it . looks like a lot flash overlay on top of reviewgist.com
Great. Just what we need, shopping tools with sliders.
Nice find.
It looks cool, but delivers results that are not quite right.
Not everything could be done with sliders.
For example some things should be set via interval.
Choosing a camera you usually know the price range you want, what’s the minumum megapixel ammount you need and that you need manual white ballance control. If they combined setting search intervals with sliders that would deliver great results.
The best product I saw is this segment is Yandex.Guru they let you set some intervals and then ask you how important are special features or feature sets.
Trilogy has been doing this for years, but limited to the domain of Automobiles. I wonder if AnswerOil has a generic configuration solution or a solution specific to certain gadgets.
just tried the demo,
impressive stuff, good as a primary or secondary source.
I think an important aspect of this market is that users visit a number of comparison engines before they buy, so its all important in this market to be the site where the purchase is made, no prizes for 2nd place if you are running an affiliate program.
At the end of the day, I may use this site to select my purchase, but I’m still going to go price hunting elsewhere on the net and choose the lowest price I can find.
So is the business model to attach this to a high traffic shopping channel?
as I commented on the original article: Omio.com does the same for mobile phones
The “interval” settings as Gleb suggests are, in fact, available in the small blue “target” icon next to each product feature name. These will be more obvious in the next version release at http://www.mology.com in a week or two..
Nice idea, but the implementation is flawed. For example, I want a digital camera and am interested in price, megapixels, weight, thickness and height in that order. It’s virtually impossible to slide the filters to reflect this prioritisation – once you move one the others start moving and mess up the order – really frustrating.
I agree with #6, http://www.omio.com is the best example of an innovative comparison UI that gives a great alternative to traditional filters.
I’ve tried the omio site based on these comments, but I just get ‘no results’ when I plug in my HTC phone specs. That blocks me from seeing any phones.
With the answeroil site I can at least see close matches, and I can keep going with my search. I can add options too and zero in on my product (camera in this case).
where do I get it? And is it in UK?
dumb dumB duMB dUMB DUMB name
neat tool though
nuthin innovative here..this was been tried (and used) for a decade..the only innovative being the underlying offtheshelf tools to create these widgets are now prime time….
looks interesting, could have legs if it’s done right.
lessons in brevity
New UI’s are great, BUT this one does not address the needs of most shoppers…
It isn’t how you filter results, it’s what you filter. Most people have no clue how many megapixels they need or what type of memory is desired. All they know is they want to take photos of little Joey jumping off the diving board for the first time.
Guided nav needs to ask real questions like: Do you take photos outside? Do you take mostly still photos or fast action photos? etc.
Technology does not solve the real business issue here.
How is this different from http://www.mypr...uctadvisor.com/ besides being prettier?
Like PyramidView mentioned, MyProductAdvisor.com has been doing this for years already and they are great at it!
This is nothing new or special in my opinion.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and perhaps only skin deep.
MyProductAdvisor.com really helps consumers. The brand promise to the consumer is based on a developed trust bond – no, you will not be sold anything, you will find what best meets your needs.
The company behind MyProductAdvisor.com, Market Insight Corporation, derives revenue by developing powerful market intelligence for retailers and manufacturers from the data supplied by real shoppers.
This company is the closest I’ve seen to a Working Solution for technically-inclined buyers. Almost anything else is crappy at best, if you compare it to the potential this solution has got in its sleeve if it’s well developed and executed.
I see two things in this service. First, widget-like shops that can be integrated into any vendor’s site (AnswerOil). That’s a really great idea. Second, a catalog-like site that lists all products and gets affiliates revenues (Mology). It’s very bright to execute both at the same time.
Now, with regard to Mology:
To achieve success with technically-inclined buyers, they’ll need to bring up price comparisons so they get as much affiliate revenues as possible. And feel more open by making sure they include all products available instead of only what’s available at amazon. They also would need to enable buyers to save their preferences.
To achieve success with non-technically-inclined buyers, they’ll need to bring up easier choice criteria. The technical details would probably be subcategories of these criteria, so everyone could add some of the few technical preferences they find important, too.
Adding small shopping guides in tooltips related to each category, to educate customers, would be a step further forward, and social-networking-like statistics and comments might also improve the value to visitors.
The company could also leverage the community by allowing it to submit corrections/additions.
All in all, the more the visitors will feel at home at Mology.com, the more they’ll feel confident, the less they’ll be inclined to ignore Mology’s affiliate links.
The First Service that will combine all these aspects in a well integrated solution might be the next strong internet player, alongside google, amazon, and etc. (or bought by one of them).
From what I’ve seen from PrismaStar in AnswerOil and Mology, PrismaStar might become that First Service. The quality of their preview releases makes me confident all my suggestions here are already incorporated in their plans, or have at least been thoroughly considered.
It felt really weird to see their exact implementation in AnswerOil of this idea I myself came up with in 2004 (and cherished unto this day without ever developing it). Priorities, targets, lines for criteria, dynamically-organized columns, all that was part of my first idea (and more). Up to today, I was really impressed nobody had developed it (at a scale that would at the very least compete with cnet). After all, I don’t claim the idea wasn’t obvious. It’s on the contrary really obvious and that’s one more reason to support the claim that a good execution would warrant success.
Sort of like Retrevo?
http://www.retrevo.com/
Technically inclined consumers that value low prices can check out the site – http://www.disc...zonwebstore.com
We are a group of MBAs that are running an amazon webstore as part of a WEB 2.0 technology course. All proceeds go to charity through http://www.globalgiving.com.
Yes, there are quite a few players in this space now, as the previously mentioned and sites like http://buzzillions.com/, http://www.testfreaks.com/ etc.. almost all of these sites brings something good to the table but falls short in other areas.
AnswerOil seems like an interesting concept and a great technology but are they going to build a destination site out of it? Maybe they should just license their technology to the other guys