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Browse goods at the Shopwave mpire

By Pranav Chavda ⋅ March 6, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

“visual shopping” web-apps are mushrooming around the web; with a hope to offer a better and more unique shopping experience to online buyers (and make money in the process too).

browsegoodsBrowsegoods, for example and lets users browse products on amazon as if they were browsing a map on google maps - you can zoom in and out of product category maps. The more you zoom in, the more products you get to see, once you have decided upon a product, zoom into the product to see more information about it. Very interesting concept, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a look.

Other visual shopping apps worthy of a mention include BlackDogAir (lets shoppers browse through Books movies and music as if they were browsing a windows explorer window for files) and of course the already Like.com visual shoppingpopular Like.com that recognizes stuff people are wearing in photos and displays similar products available to buy on various stores in their database (which, it seems is populated with datafeeds from affiliate networks etc.).

Today, yet another “Visual shopping experience” has launched, this time built on top of the shopping.com API, from the labs of mpire, called Shopwave.

shopwave

If you are a regular user of Apple’s iPhoto or Google’s Picasa, you are already familiar with the shopwave interface.

From their blog-post:

Shopwave is an experiment focusing specifically on the use of product images versus text and lists

Upon entering shopwave, shoppers can select to browse either product categories or popular searches. Click a category or search term to view a list of product thumbnail images that one can zoom into, move the mouse over a thumbnail and product info is displayed on the right side of the web-page (along with a more info button that takes shoppers to the main shopping comparison website). One can also browse products using a not so cool “filmstrip” view instead of zoom-able thumbnails.

Shopwave screen shot

Visual shopping, as far as my thinking goes, is the next logical step in online shopping, These apps are rather raw as of now and it may take time for shoppers to adapt to such new mechanisms, but not as much as it may look like, It’d more more like switching to a mac - you are using it for the first time, but you already know how to. Your brain, your subconscious knows. The way we use the web is becoming easier each day - these things are, I am sure, the 2.0 of online shopping.

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Discussion

Comments for “Browse goods at the Shopwave mpire”

  • Gui
    Most of these sites are oriented to soft goods, where the product's features are not much relevant for the consumer. But products where features are importantm those sites described above are almost useless.

    You forgot to mention www.CrispyShop.com, which is probably the coolest of all visual shopping sites. At CrispyShop you visualize 50 products at once by their price, features and popularity.
    Group digital cameras by megapixels and: "Hey I can get this 10 megapixels Sony digital camera for lower price than this 5 megapixels from Sony..."

    For soft goods, browsegoods.com is probably the best; for products where features are important, CrispyShop.com is by far the best one.
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