Shopping Path’s CrispyShop

by Brian Smith, on February 13th, 2007

I’ve known about ShoppingPath for a couple months, but Guilherme Leal inventor and co-founder of the company was putting on some finishing touches. The site is in Beta, but I thought it was now worth a mention. ShoppingPath has launched a site called CrispyShop.

CrispyShop takes another spin on visual shopping, graphically displaying products by price, popularity or by feature. As a reader commented yesterday, BrowseGoods is great for products that people buy based on appearance more than features. I’m not sure if that’s completely true, but I admit that I’m not going to use BrowseGoods to pick out my next iPod or TV. However, I might use CrispyShop…at least as a starting point.

crispyshop shoppingpath

CrispyPath CrispyPath is grabbing Yahoo! Shopping results through Yahoo! Shopping Web Services and organizing the information on a single interactive chart. Maybe it’s my undergrad degree in economics, but the UI just makes sense to me…similar to Yahoo! Finance Beta or Google Finance clicking with me.

Now I’m waiting for the comment that these new UIs don’t matter. They are just simple mashups of data that’s already out there…affiliate sites that will never get anywhere. How do they get traffic? I’m not claiming that sites like BrowseGoods or ShoppingPath (or ShopStyle) will take over the world tomorrow, but the regular old shopping comparison engine or etail layout hasn’t changed that much in the last 5 years. Web 2.0 has infiltrated other verticals, but shopping still seems almost immune to the changes. I don’t think that can last much longer. Shopzilla, Shopping.com, NexTag, Yahoo! Shopping, and PriceGrabber might dominate the shopping comparison engine space, but I think it’s critical for them to start thinking about how to better display their data and more importantly, provide an incredible user experience. That’s what these new guys are doing…they’re piggy-backing off of all the hard work the shopping engines have put into aggregating and organizing products and focusing 1000% on building the best shopping experience.

Comparison shopping is not going away, but the way people approach comparison shopping will change. That’s why I like that eBay, Amazon, Shopping.com, and Yahoo! Shopping are out there with good APIs that let entrepreneurs launch sites like Sprenzy, CrispyPathCrispyShop, or BrowseGoods. Not all of these affiliate sites will make it, but opening up web services allows the big shopping comparison engines to get their feet wet and see what sticks with shoppers.

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hanfrac said

These new UI’s don’t matter (much). Not because they are mashups. But more because I don’t see people flocking to these new shopping interfaces unless they also add a lot of value. Great - you can filter by color at ShopWiki. Great - you can filter by “toe style” or “bag clasp” at like.com. Great - BrowseGoods has built a floor layout. But once you get over the newness and neatness of it, it’s hard to use. What will actually get bought through an interface like that?

They’re cool and they’re new. But they’re not useful. At least not enough and not yet.

Note - I agree that shopping interfaces seem stuck in an Amazon world. I’m waiting to see something that is innovative AND functional AND solves a problem.

February 13th, 2007 at 12:40 pm |

EarlyMiser said

Classic issue is what is the problem being solved by these new UIs? It’s really hard to say but the interface at crispyshop is “designer cool” not user cool.

February 16th, 2007 at 12:05 pm |

Gui-Leal said

The basic assumption of the Shopping community is that the way products or offers should be displayed is by lists or tables, where the most relevant items should be displayed at the top of the list. Similar to models used by search engines.

The fundamental problem of lists is that people can compare only a few items (max 6) displayed at the screen. At the time, people scrolled down at the end of the list or changed pages, they forgot the relationship of the items viewed before.
How can you expect consumers to efficiently compare hundred of options? In fact consumers usually limit their choices to the first page, and usually to the first item.

Graphical representation is a classical solution for this problem. The following question is what is the most efficient graphical pattern that would efficiently represent options of Products and Offers?
People tentatively tried to use treemaps to solve it, but it is inefficient. Our answer is the ShoppingPath pattern.

Even though CrispyShop was featured at ComparisonEngines.com and at the SDforum event last Tuesday at Yahoo; the ShoppingPath experience is still early-stage and incomplete (there is a lot to come).

Most people think the actual model is cool, but wonder about its value. That is not a surprise, because the feature, which shows the value proposition is not visible yet.
At the time the product is complete, the value proposition will be obvious. For now the product is very incomplete.

If you have comments and recommendations, please send it to us at: http://www.shoppingpath.com/htmls/feedback.html

Regards, Gui

February 16th, 2007 at 1:50 pm |

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