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The shop assistant

Submitted by: siliconglen
Created: Aug 25, 2006, 7:11 pm

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The Idea

Helping customers to buy complex products This site links through to existing articles and reviews in magazines and also to stores which sell said product and will earn commission on these sales through referrals. What people need is a front end guiding people to existing reviews and based on a wizard which guides people through the buying process and helping them to deal with the many products on the market and the complex range of functionality available. For instance, there's three complex products I'm looking to buy at the moment - a wireless network, a new mobile phone and an MBA. Even as a technically aware person, this still takes up a lot of my time. What is needed is a wizard which asks people "what is important to you" and then limits the field by functionality and prioritises the results based on closest match. Existing sites don't do this - try looking for a mobile phone at Amazon based on "great at browsing the web"

I thought of this idea when I was...

Realising that the complexity of feature sets in many products is often bewildering and what is needed is an online buying assistant that works like a shop assistant asking the customer typical questions to get the list of possible products and features down to a more maneagable quantity and then ranking the results based on user preference and whether independent reviews have recommended them rather than me having to hunt around for what people have said about them all the time. How this works is when a product gets a great review or editor's choice in a magazine, someone creates a link to the magazine article and then tags the link with keywords and their own description. Then when someone is looking for that product, they can see a list of the available keywords and click those products that match and quickly get to the relevant reviews. The person creating the link also gets a share of the revenue. It's wikipedia for product buying!

Comments Posted

academyis01 Posted: August 30, 2006, 8:22 pm

This is a great idea. You can do things like this with a search on eBay and certain other sites, but I don't know of a universal site that does it for all products on the web. Money could definately be made through commission/affiliate programs with the e-stores.

saigon Posted: August 1, 2007, 10:45 pm

The person creating the link also gets a share of the revenue: what percentage are we talking here?

vanhees Posted: August 2, 2007, 4:27 am

content?
Tommy

PhilipH Posted: August 5, 2007, 10:51 am

Might be worth having a read through some of the recent ideas on here - I've read a few that might be similar enough that you want to collaborate and share the workload.

Brenden Posted: August 6, 2007, 3:48 pm

i do not see a market

ccozad Posted: August 6, 2007, 3:55 pm

This already exists in many areas for electronics... visit CNet.com, Tom's Hardware. I don't see the differentiation.

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