BrowseGoods launches: zoom, pan, and click to Shop

By Vivek | February 12th, 2007 at 11:52 pm ET         

Dotted Pair Inc today launched its visual shopping engine BrowseGoods, which I think is a great way to find new products. All shopping is always visual, but in the end it boils down to how many items your need to scan through before you find something that interests you. BrowseGoods addresses this exact part very nicely. With its Google Maps like interface, you can zoom into your product category to browse over available items at a really fast pace. BrowseGoods currently lists products from 4 broad categories- Shoes, Toys, Sports, and Watches. Consider the case of shoes. With just 3 clicks you are taken from Men’s to Boots to Casual & Comfort and ready to look at images of thousands of shoes from all the major brands. A click on any item gives you a pop-up with a zoomed-in image, pricing information, and options to save, email, and buy the item which takes you to Amazon.

BrowseGoods is currently working with Amazon Affiliate program to generate revenues from click-throughs. Possibilities for BrowseGoods are endless as it can easily expand its product categories and work with other major retailers in form of a white-label solution or working with their API to broaden its product reach. The site does have few missing features, and issues with the zoom and pan controls, which I think the Browsegoods team will definitely fix in the next few releases.

Visual search idea is definitely interesting and application in number of places. BrowseGoods seems to get it right. Last year I had written about Quintura’s visual search engine, which discovers lot more relations in context to your keyword than you might ordinarily think about. The tiny problem for Quintura is it is competing with Google.

Links:
BrowseGoods