Social shopping site Wishpot has taken $1 million Series A in a round led by Monster Venture Partner that included H-Farm and Adrian Hanauer.
Wishpot is a social shopping service that lets you collect and and share information about items you find online and in stores. By creating a common space in which users can browse, recommend products, get advice, and find new items they’re interested in, Wishpot seeks to simplify shopping.
The company said it would use the funding to further enhance its vertical offerings, improve the Wishpot platform, increase business development activities and introduce business analytics for enterprise customers.
Wishpot competes in the same space as Kaboodle, Stylehive, Yahoo Shoposphere, Zlio and MyPickList.
Last Christmas my dad gave me “Love Smart” by Dr. Phil. It was horrifying. This year, I am taking the necessary steps to make sure something like that never happens again!
I started with UK-based Gifttagging.com. We covered the company in April in comparison to MyPickList. Gifttagging has a new widget that installs two icons in the toolbar. One lets you tag any page, sending the link directly to your wishlist. The other sends you to your Gifttagging home page. Both are available for Firefox and IE.
I love the tagging icon but it’s a little intrusive. I don’t love that every time I tag something, it sends me directly to an input page where I have to fill in the price and description of the item. I’d prefer to get a small pop-up where I could input the necessary info, save it, close it, and continue on my merry shopping way. That way I wouldn’t have to remember how much the item costs and any description details.
The second icon, however, is pretty unnecessary. I don’t need an icon to take me to my Gifttagging homepage. I can just bookmark that. I don’t like unnecessary usage of my browser real estate.
Inviting (and uninviting) others to see your wishlist is really easy. You can also keep different wishlists for different occasions and import wishlists from Amazon.
MyPickList allows users to send wishlist updates via RSS, blogs, or social networks. You also earn commission if someone buys from one of the vendors on your list. That’s pretty hard to compete with but I think the winning program will be the one that necessitates the least amount of work for both the giver and the receiver. Either way, I still don’t think my dad would use this. He would certainly ignore the email inviting him to join Gifttagging and most likely wouldn’t use the widget. But at least I can keep track of the links in Gifttagging, send them to him in an old-fashioned email, and try not to be a spoiled little ingrate.
MyPickList is a new service that launched earlier this month. It allows users to create a list of items they would recommend to others, linked to merchants that sell those items. I wrote about it pre-launch here. They are creating tools to easily create the lists and publish them on websites. My Pick List has affiliate relationships with the merchants (current list is here), and gives publishers a cut of any sales that occur from the list. It’s similar to Yahoo’s Shoposphere, although Yahoo does not yet share any revenues with the publisher.
For publishers, it’s an easy way to promote things that they recommend and earn affilite fees without having a direct relationship with the merchant. My Pick List keeps about 60% of the revenue, though, which in my opinion is too much and needs to come down over time.
The site could use a few evolutions on design, but they are rolling out new functionality regularly. They have just released a quick widget creation tool for Myspace users, shown in the screen shot. If My Pick List can find a way to get through to these users virally or through a partnership, something like this could potentially become quite popular.
UK-based Gifttagging just launched moments ago, and Florida-based MyPickList will be launching a private beta in about two weeks. These are similar products (product bookmarking), but with different functions. Gifttagging is focused on a wish list (think Amazon Wish List), whereas MyPickList is all about making cold, hard cash based on product recommendations.
Gifttagging.com, created by Jeremy Baines and his team, is a combination of Amazon Wish List and del.icio.us. Bookmark products using either their bookmarklet or firefox extension, tag them and place them either in your “gift list” or your “I have list”. Bonus feature: you can import your Amazon Wish List and start with that. Many of the features are similar to Kaboodle, although this is a highly specialized site focused just on gifts. I like it.
Jeff Eichel’s MyPickList is better understood in terms of Yahoo Shoposphere – It’s a service to help people make money by recommending products they like to others. I’ve posted screen shots of how the service will look here.
Collecting items will work very much life Gifttagging – via a bookmarking function. Your lists will be published on the mypicklist.com website and via RSS. But more interesting, MyPickList will provide tools to users to promote these lists on their own blogs and websites. Users can promote a widget containing the items they are promoting or create a custom banner ad with the items.
Any purchases of these items will generate money for the user. MyPickList is creating affiliate relationships with online merchants. Users promoting items will receive “approximately” 40% of affiliate revenue generated, and MyPickList keeps the rest. A nice feature is that users will not be required to sign up for affiliate relationships directly. MyPickList will take care of the accounting and issue the publisher a check.
For many bloggers, MyPickList will be a nice way to make money from recommending a wide variety of products. I can imagine, for instance, millions of passionate MySpace users putting up MyPickLists of their favorite music and movies. Pete Cashmore calls it “a pretty smart idea”. I agree. Except they need to push up the revenue share with users to more like 85%.
