With upwards of 200,000 wedding vendors in the U.S. alone, the wedding industry can be both fiercely competitive and highly profitable for businesses. A new website, WeddingBook, is attempting to become a highly comprehensive search aggregator for or U.S. wedding vendors by offering highly exposed listings for free.
WeddingBook allows vendors to list an advertisement on the site without the “pay-to-play” stipulation commonly used. For example, one of WeddingBook’s most established competitors, The Knot, requires vendors to pay listing and lead fees to advertise services on the sites.
WeddingBook allows any local wedding vendor to create a listing and a web page, including pricing information and service details. But nothing comes entirely for free. If a bride-to-be decides to “request a proposal” from a particular vendor listed on WeddingBook and the vendor wants to submit a proposal to the potential customer, the vendor will pay a “modest” fee to WeddingBook. Fees are determined by the revenue opportunity and geography of a vendor. For example, an event space will not be charged the same fee as a photographer.
So, will this work?
Perhaps. Already, WeddingBook has 65,000 listings compared to The Knot’s 16,000 listings. WeddingBook’s search options are very comprehensive and useful to consumers. Brides can use a filtering tool not only to narrow vendors by location but also by budget parameters. The filtering tools also change according to vendor. For example, a user can search for a photographer by a preferred type of shooting style, the availability to see online proofs, or the ability to work with additional staff on the wedding day. Vendors can also be recommended by other vendors on the site or reviewed by consumers.
CEO and founder John Dillon launched WeddingBook in the fall of 2007 and has spent the last year and a half recruiting vendors, which he said wasn’t difficult with his new business model. The site received an undisclosed angel round of funding from TripAdvisor founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer; Dan Saul, founder of Smarter Travel Media; and others. Dillon says that while fellow wedding websites, like The Knot, offer valuable content and advice for brides-to-be, WeddingBook will focus exclusively on what they do best: perhaps becoming the TripAdvisor for weddings?
Marriage is criminal imprisonment. Sites like these worsen the pain of regret.
Hrmm…..
http://www.andd...demo-t3856.html
Wouldn’t it be awesome to point your Android phone at somebody and have the phone spit out the person’s name before you ever met them?
I spend so much time debugging my own application and trying to keep myself from creating something else that’s cooler.
Unfortunately businesses will only pay for business applications, and those aren’t very cool.
As for getting married. I should be in July. In a land far, far away.
You know how ShopSavvy “Search for a product” scans UPC bar codes with your G1 camera, pings a server with the SKU and returns a price???
Why can’t we do that with people’s faces, and build a big FBI like database ???
Can’t is a bad word that web 3.0 will denounce, yes we can.
You mash that up with wink or spock, or even MySpace, and suddenly you point your G1 at girls at the supermarket and it returns their yearly income, their marital status, their likes and dislikes, their drunken weekend photos ect…
You can customize pickup lines based on their vital SKU info, all from matching facial characteristics against those in their profile pictures.
This is the future. The future is now. I have seen it in my crystal ball.
After reading sites like http://www.f2bb.com I’m not sure I ever want to get married.
Interesting to see if they can get any traction in the wedding biz which is a pretty big market
I like wedding based websites because they’ll always have market, no matter how much money the government spends on saving wallstreet’s ass.
http://tr.im/gk8j
great idea…I had a similar idea for bringing together vendors and brides/grooms…looks like they are already on it.
Not sure how the founder considers this is a “new business model”.
Directories/pay-for-a-lead web sites have been around since the 90s. I developed the UI for such a site while working at one of the darlings of web 1.0.
Getting vendors to sign up for free is the easy part. Generating traffic and assuring that the vendor information stays current, are the hard parts.
A directory ?! Feels so like it’s 1997 again ! I think there’s much more to do on the wedding “business” than directories. And by the way, I’m currently trying to do it
By the way I forgot to mention what is better: just have a look at Zankyou (see recent article on Techcrunch France: http://fr.techc...a-la-sauce-web/ ) or WeddingWire
In WedTool we have bet on a SaaS application for what either the couple or wedding planner are able
to plan the wedding arrangements ( wedding guest – attendance confirmation , budget, wedding card, seating plan, etc.)
Also it’s possible to create the wedding website. Next step will be FaceBook Connect integration.
You can take a look at http://www.WedTool.com
Any feedback is welcome
think that it is great idea and it has the potential to become very popular if the company can manage it well. Marriage is a universal thing. I feel that WeddingBook has the potential to attract vendors from outside of USA. We all know that many celebrity couples like to get married in other countries.
A directory service is nice, but not nearly as useful as a site like Wedding Wire (www.weddingwire.com) that not only brings vendors and brides/grooms-to-be together, but provides everything they need to manage the wedding planning.
Seems to me Wedding Wire is more deserving of Techcrunch coverage. And no, I am not an employee, investor, etc…just a fan!
TheKnot acquired a Facebook app called Weddingbook recently (http://www.paid...app-weddingbook). Is this a different company?
Hi Joe– yep, we are completely seperate from the application on facebook.
This is nothing new at all – not sure why they think that pay-per lead is a new model.
There was a pay-per-lead program on http://www.ourweddingday.com 2 years ago, and they certainly weren’t the first. Also, users were matched to their appropriate vendor in terms of area, style and budget. Coupled with that, the user gets all the tools they need to plan their wedding.
Has anyone seen http://www.blissbook.com It’s kind of like this but it also allows a lot of users to upload photos from their weddings to share with other couples.
What about http://www.OneWed.com ?? They have over 200,000 local vendors in their database!
If you are impressed with WeddingBook or The Knot, you MUST check out OneWed!
We had them beat from the getgo, including free listings and traffic.
Sorry,
Here is our company:
http://www.weddepot.com
Also look here:
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
I think its kind of funny that a lot of new sites copy the space in myspace or the book in facebook. But you can’t argue with the success of the domain name. I think that is probably 90 percent of whether a site is successful or not, the ease of remembering the website name.
I think getting married is a great thing. If you chose a compatible mate, you can be happy for life! Let the party begin!