The web is filled with countless editorial and user reviews on nearly every consumer product you can find in retail stores. But sifting through this wealth of information is a chore, and it’s never clear which reviewers actually know what they’re talking about. Bestcovery, a new startup launching today, is looking to eliminate these hassles by offering an at-a-glance guide to finding the best item in many popular consumer product categories. The site was founded by Kamran Pourzanjani, co-founder and former CEO of PriceGrabber.com, which was sold to Experian for $500 million.
Bestcovery currently offers brief product reviews on categories including home appliances, health and beauty, and consumer electronics like televisions and video games. But unlike most review sites, which assign vague Pros and Cons and leave the consumer to make the final decision, Bestcovery labels one product as “the best”. The top product in each category is chosen by a Bestcovery ‘expert’, and is prominently featured on the page alongside a brief description. Towards the bottom of the page, a handful of runners-up are listed. Each product description also includes links to online stores that carry the item, but Bestcovery doesn’t sell anything itself.
All Bestcovery reviews and analysis is performed by a team of in-house editors as well as external ‘experts’, who lend their information to the site for free. The site hopes to cut back on possible bias by allowing users to submit suggestions if they feel the wrong product has been chosen as “the best”, but editors have ultimate control over who gets the top billing.
For major purchases like computers or TV sets, I would be hesitant to use Bestcovery as my only source of information – there is simply too much room for bias, and personal taste plays a big role in these purchases. But for smaller items that I know nothing about, like electric razors, I would readily turn to Bestcovery to make a choice for me. That said, the site is going to have a long road ahead. There are countless well established review sites, and while other sites may not always label a product as “the best”, they generally have a list of the most popular or top rated items, which can be similarly interpreted.
No smart shopper uses a single site for comparison. Bestcovery is a great way to get a quick, top-level view of leaders in a given space.
Cool site! I like reading reviews for most tech products, but http://www.bestcovery.com will save a lot of time with the stuff I need but don’t want to read about.
This is going to great for those impulse online purchases where you know you shouldn’t be buying something, but since you are doing it, you might as well be getting the best out there!
Wait, is it sane to justify impulse purchases like that?
And how do they make money??
Nice job Kam. Great looking site, very useful. To answer your question Cartman, lead generation on products. In a recession, converting leads for dollars is one of the most cost efficient play for advertisers and is lucrative for high SEO publishers like BestCovery. Kamran started PriceGrabber, so he knows the lead gen space in depth. This will make money.
I like the fact that there is an alternative option to the crowd-sourcing approach. I agree with you Jason, there are a number of items I just want to see what is deemed the best, and my personal taste is not as big a deal.
Their graphic design, and their model of picking “experts” looks very similar to Opposing Views. OV seems to abide by the expert model rather than the crowdsourcing model. Somehow I doubt there will be a $500 million exit for this one.
Love the idea; just tell me what’s best! I could see this site growing into something big as they add more categories.
Microsoft’s Live Search aggregates a large number of consumer and expert reviews online and compiles them into a handy “Opinion Index.” For me, this is a better approach because it comes from a diversity of sources. It does sentiment detection to see if the comments people are making about products and features are positive or negative. Here’s Bestcovery’s top LCD TV in the opinion index: http://tinyurl.com/6h4yfw
…and it looks like Bestcovery nailed it…review aggregation is a good point of reference but sometimes you just want someone to tell you what’s the best…just tell me what to buy.
Great implementation and should stand out and appeal to consumers at a time when lesser competitors will probably struggle.
This site is great, It made my search for a new digital camera really easy.
I needed to get a good gift for my nephew. I checked out the site and got a cool ps3 game recommendation!
Nice site.
This is a fairly awesome idea. Assuming they up their product space, EASY mass market appeal. Two issues, however:
1. are they getting referrals for people clicking through?
2. where are the WOMEN’S products? They can’t be that hard to objectively rate.
They have a suggest a category submission, so ask them to cover those.
Too bad Bestcovery doesn’t emphasize environmentally friendly products. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to take that into account at all. It was an opportunity for them to make a difference to the planet, but they didn’t.
Much better is PristinePlanet.com.
Errr….Am I the only one who doesn’t get it? I don’t understand why this commonplace site is featured on TechCrunch. Unless they paid TC for the infortisement.
Bestcovery offers a more limited set of features than Amazon IMO. On Amazon you already can find easily what the best item is in each category. Just sort lists of products properly and pick #1. Regarding comments, Amazon has many more comments from real users like you and me, and you can make up your mind easily.
I have no compelling reason to use this skimmed ecommerce site.
I like this idea…I like it so much that I started a similar site over a year ago. We don’t have the marketing budget or techcrunch connections that Bestcovery.com has, but our products are hand-selected to be “most reasonable” in their product class. In these difficult economic times, you may not be able to afford the best, but reasonable is something you can always afford.
reasonablegoods.com