Get aggregated product reviews from Wize.com
By Vivek Puri | September 20th, 2006 at 10:29 pm ET
Wize.com wants to play the web2.0 shopping game bit differently. Wize aggregates product reviews and prices from over 4500 websites including Amazon, Shopping.com, and Yahoo.com to help users find great products. Product range is pretty comprehensive ranging from Computer, Electronics, Photos and Optics, Office Equipment, and more. Wise, founded by Doug Baker, opened the website in August and is located in Minneapolis, MN.
Each product on Wize has a Wize Rank (0 to 100) that helps people find the best products fast. Wize Rank takes into account the user reviews, expert reviews, and buzz around the product. These user and expert reviews from independent sources across the web. Wise provides description for each product and lists out number of user and expert reviews found on each of the monitored sites. Wize quantifies the buzz around a product by comparing the count of reviews in the last 60 days against the review count of similar products.
Wize also provides the price of product in various stores and can also give you tax and shipping according to you zip. Products can also be narrowed down by price range and other options depending upon the product. Wize has a daily updated list of products called Wize100, which are obviously the top 100 products at Wize.
Wize uses content aggregation technology from Jux2 to power Wize.com and Wize Rank, which is an award-winning metasearch engine. Doug Baker had bought Jux2 in a sale on eBay, last year, for $101,000. Wize does not aim to index every product available but aims for products with critical mass. If a product doesn’t have multiple reviews, it might not show up on Wize.
User can add products to their “My Research” area for reference purpose. However the user reference area is cookie based that means you cannot access the same account from multiple machines or if you delete cookie, you delete your saved products. This seems to be a weak point in otherwise a great product. I think Wize should provide RSS feeds for product reviews and prices, which can be very helpful when researching new products.
Wize derives revenue from sponsored links on the bottom of each product page. Wize.com’s offering seems to be pretty strong. Right now most of us have to consult number of websites before we can come to the conclusion whether the product is worth the money or not. Wize does seem to make this task easier. It needs to be seen how dependable Wize Rank and its algorithm are.
Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, Shopping, Wize
