As the holiday shopping season approaches many of us will be facing some very tough decisions: do we get the Asus netbook computer or the HP Mini, a Canon digital camera or a Nikon. A whole sub-industry has arisen to help consumers make those decisions with sites ranging from CNET to gdgt. Today, Measy enters the fray by trying to help you make that decision by asking you a series of questions about the gadget you want and then coming up with the top three choices based on your criteria.
Launched in private beta in September, Measy’s site is now publicly available. It helps you make purchasing decisions about digital cameras, HDTVs, and netbooks by asking you about your needs and preferences. (”How important is travel?”; “How important is brand?”). It then scores each device on the traits important to you and delivers an overall score.
The site only supports a handful of consumer electronics categories, but every month or so it will add a new category. Smartphones are next. With today’s launch, Measy also added information on the site about the best places to recycle electronic gadgets (which I never know how to find).
Taking a decision-tree approach and then boiling down each attribute of a product to a score is one way to cut through the consumer-electronics clutter, but can you really trust it to come up with the best product for you? Give it a whirl and tell us what you think in comments.
This is genius.
Worthless.
Not enough options to make any kind of intelligent decision.
Incredible site, exactly what I need to shop for christmas!
Such a great site! Made everything so much easier for me — I get overwhelmed in the store and this helped me find exactly what I wanted! Plus, it makes shopping for my boyfriend and dad so much faster and more convenient. I actually feel like I can trust the site to help me find what’s best.
thanks!
I used this in private beta and found it very useful. I would like to see more products being offered, but overall, I believe there is a large market for this website and it will be a significant success.
I like the market measy is focused on. This site will take the market share of people who are less tech savvy and who don’t want to do their own extensive research. It will not be overtaking gdgt or cnet but will help those who need simplicity in the sea of too much information!
The reason many of these sites are merely emulatory in both their structure and success is that people want to be convinced when making a purchase. Humans are generally not so rational that they know exactly what they want, particularly if they seek out this site because they were previously confuddled. And those that are so rational will either not approach the site, or make up such a small portion of the market that the site will not be able to profit from the community of supremely rational and needs-aware.
Interesting idea, I’ll have to check it out. What if you wanted to answer more than 3 questions?
“Measy”? Shades of Miasole. See #FSJ classics.
Who did *this* measly job of branding?
They should also include Q’s such as:
1. Is the country where the product is made important? e.g. Japan, China, Malaysia, etc
2. Does the brand support things you care about?
Also, they can take a chapter out of Amazon’s book and once they get enough data, present users with the ability to see what buyers who were looking for similar things, with similar criteria, ultimately ended up buying and why. Such info is always a goldmine.
These are great ideas Stan. We looked into the country-of-origin issue when we were putting together our plan for corporate responsibility research and found that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to trace the manufacturing course that an individual product takes. TVs, cell phones, and other electronics are usually manufactured piecemeal in a number of different factories and countries before being assembled. Even Dell – whose plants in Texas and Tennessee are some of the only major computer assembly plants in the US – manufacturers and assembles its computers in over a dozen countries.
We’d still love to do something like this and are working on potential solutions.
As for your other two ideas – We have a bunch of corporate responsibility info on the site that we will definitely build on. Looking into things like the causes and politics that a company supports is a great idea. Recommending products that “users like you” like is something else in the pipeline.
Thanks! Hit us up anytime with more thoughts or feedback.
Ev Boyle
Editor, Measy.com
Sources:
http://www.mark...of-pc-factories
http://pewresea...r/?NumberID=722
http://somo.nl/...ublication_1956
http://online.w...4137994489.html
No problem guys! I think you have a great and very useful product, and with the right amount of marketing, partnerships, persistence, etc., you can definitely make a lot of things happen and be very successful!
Think of ways to engage your users. Create a viral marketing campaign where one (or more) of your users will actually win a product he will be searching for (if it’s under a certain price point of course) each week, month, etc, and get people to talk about it on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Create partnerships and make money by licensing your technology to different eCommerce companies who can use it to help their customers find the best product match, from within their inventory, etc.
Again, good luck guys!!
Stan
It would be better to extend this with more advanced questions for people who know their stuff but are still in doubt choosing from the many products.
Thanks for the feedback Judge. We’ve found that making the quiz any longer or more complex than it currently is turns off a large number of users. That’s not to say we won’t ever add to or modify the quizzes, just that there’s a balance we’re trying to strike between accessibility and detail.
Have you tried to search for products “by exploring”? (ex: http://www.meas...igital-cameras/)
There are a number of sorting and filtering options in that section that are more tailored to advanced users. We’re continuously building out the “explore” area, so don’t hesitate to send over suggestions (feedback@measy.com).
This site has a UI problem – also – the measy score is skewed – gave me 100% on brand match when I said that any brand is ok, thus raising the scores by over 10 points for each product.
Also – wonder what the business model is here