ShopWiki Lets Shoppers Get to Know Elmo

The in-store shopping public can be segmented in lots of ways, and one of those criteria is their receptiveness to sales help. Some consumers want to browse through a store on their own; others appreciate the help of a salesperson in demonstrating the features and use of a product.

That second group of buyers can now get some of the same face-to-face shopping assistance when they research products online, thanks to the addition of consumer-generated product videos by comparison shopping engine ShopWiki.

Since June, ShopWiki has been integrating user-made videos into its Web site, priming the content pump by offering $50 apiece for the first 500 submissions (on condition that they pass approval by ShopWiki’s product guide team.) Co-founder and CEO Kevin Ryan says the site has “several hundred” videos for individual products: “When we launched [in June] we had 50, and we must have seven or eight times that number now.”

That’s still a far cry from exhaustive footage of the 120 million products ShopWiki indexes from some 180,000 U.S. retailers. To keep the momentum going, the site is now considering extending that token payment beyond those first 500 clips.

The ShopWiki home page itself has been recently redesigned to emphasize the visual element, incorporating clickable photos of product categories rather than plain-vanilla lists. Video reviews aren’t featured on that new home page; users have to click on a link at the bottom of the page to find them.

But once they do, they’ll find a range of product info that may come to serve as an important differentiator for ShopWiki in the still-crowded comparison shopping category. While it’s true that some consumers are more comfortable researching purchases via static spec sheets, and others can be content with a still photo—does anyone really need to see a Calphalon frying pan in action?—nevertheless, there are plenty of products for which a good video is irreplaceable.

For example, as noted in Brian Smith’s Comparisonengines.com blog, any toy-shopping parent curious about what to look forward to with the new TMX Elmo doll can go to http://www.shopwiki.com/wiki/Elmo, view a full demo of the doll’s performance courtesy of “tarrina”, and make a truly informed decision as to whether they can stand to live with that high-pitched cackling giggle for the next year.

Ryan says the video submissions still tend to be fairly random, depending on what product users are feeling evangelistic about. “Some people do ten videos,” he says. “People can do their research, produce their videos, and if they’ve achieved what we decide is a certain quality level we’ll accept the. You don’t need to have 20 years’ experience with toasters or refrigerators to be able to explain what you like and don’t like about a toaster or refrigerator.”

“Think about how you shop in-store. You don’t spend an hour trying to find out about a refrigerator on your own. You have a salesperson come over, he opens the door and points out some features, and you spend a few minutes learning what you need. We felt we could duplicate that experience.”

ShopWiki hosts and serves the videos. That means an added expense in bandwidth costs, but that’s made considerably easier to bear because Ryan, a veteran of the DoubleClick ad network, also co-founded and heads up another company, the Panther Express content distribution network. “We deliver video for many clients, such as Gawker and Bolt, and cache content all over the world,” he says. “So we know how to serve video pretty effectively.”

Ryan points out that video clips of consumers actually interacting with and reviewing products fit well with ShopWiki’s larger mission: to tap into the communal shopping wisdom of average people through category-related buying guides, gift guides and product-specific reviews. Those “wikis” have been a mainstay of the site since it launched in April of this year and have grown to 1500 from the original 1000. While most of those are still produced by ShopWiki staff members writing about their own enthusiasms, Rayn says that figure doesn’t take into account that many of those guides have been modified and added to by registered users, in proper wiki fashion.

ShopWiki’s recent revamp added some other features too, both on the consumer and the merchant sides. Users can now sort their product searches by color using a spectrum slider. Users can also register on the site to save past searches, create wish lists and price alerts, and share their finds with other members.

And merchants can sign up gratis for the site’s Merchant Center, which allows them to update shipping and sales tax information, add contact points for the products ShopWiki indexes them for, and track how many of their offers currently show up in the index.

ShopWiki doesn’t accept merchant feeds, preferring to crawl the Web on its own. The engine also excludes affiliate sites where it detects them, preferring to send consumers directly to the retailer from whom they can buy.

The site’s only revenue is generated by serving up Google pay-per-click ads, and Ryan says that won’t change any time soon. “This year we’ve been focusing on the product, continuing to make it better and better,” Ryan says. “Next year will be about generating traffic and really starting to push on the revenue side.”

For the coming month, Ryan expects that the rising holiday tide will lift all the comparison-shopping boats; he doesn’t see this season as a major opportunity for one or two engines to grab market share and dominate the space. In fact, he says, online commerce should be able to support a number of competing shopping engines for some time to come.

“There may be some consolidation next year, but online comparison shopping won’t lend itself to one major player the way eBay dominates online auctions, for example,” he says. “Ebay’s business model lends itself to a winner-take-all structure: If you have the most Mickey Mouse dolls to sell, then as a buyer I want to be there, and if you have the most buyers, then as a seller I want to be there.”

But no comparison shopping engine has more than 10% of the total segment traffic, Ryan says, and that includes the big brand names Google and Yahoo!. “In this space, what matters is whether consumers think the product’s tools and features work better,” he says. “If you think they do, you’re happy to use that engine. And right now the market can support a number of different engines, all of which can succeed.”