Wize Blog

The Impact of Social Shopping Sites

In his provocatively titled blog “Impact of Social Sites on Retail Sales Less than Thought”, Grew Howlett references a recent JupiterResearch study estimating that “social and community sites influence only about 12% of online shoppers to buy more than planned.”

According to Howlett:

There are two things about social sites that make them unattractive to shoppers–inefficiency and lack of fundamental information. Shoppers are simply unwilling to wade through lots of biased and incomplete data on social sites. However, 29% say that they use social sites to reaffirm decisions.

So while only a small percentage of online shoppers say social sites caused them to purchase more, a full 29% of online shoppers say that social sites can actually help them decide what to buy. This feels revolutionary – if nearly one third of all shoppers use social sites to help them figure out what to buy, then the opportunity is huge. More than ever, sites that gather independent information that can help that 29% decide what to buy – how to spend their money wisely without a vested interest in the outcome – will be increasingly important. Sites like Wize.com, that is. That’s what we think – we’d also love to hear what you think.

Wize gets Wiser

This week’s Wize.com update includes: improved Wize Ranks, a popularity index, and updated product filtering capabilities. Read on to learn more!

Improved Wize Ranks.

Our ongoing work with researchers and statisticians has yielded some terrific results, and we’re pleased to release the next step in our evolution of the Wize Rank. As it says on the Wize Rank page:

Our data analysis shows that people are most inspired to review products when they either love or hate a product (on a scale of 1-5, the numbers 2 and 3 are rarely used). This means that, when a Wize Rank is high, it generally means that there are a lot more positive reviews than negative ones. When a Wize Rank is low, it generally suggests wide disagreement about that product, or as many negative reviews as positive ones.

Click here for a complete explanation of the Wize Rank and our new rating scale.

Popularity index.

In response to the needs of customers who want to know not only the best products, but also those with the most “buzz”, Wize has added a popularity index to each product, letting customers know which products are the most talked about on the web. Customers can now sort products in every category by price, Wize Rank, brand, and popularity.

Improved attribute filtering.

Another thing we heard loud and clear from customers is the need for improved attribute filtering. As a result, we’ve just launched the ability for customers to filter on multiple attributes at the same time, including prices and brands. This improvement provides yet another way for customers to use Wize to zero in on the products that are most relevant.

Thanks for reading. We’d love to hear what you think.

Time magazine's Person of the Year

... [W]ho actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Time Magazine, December 2006

It's always an event when Time announces its person of the year, and this year's announcement was met by more than a few slaps on the head. Of course! It's us! Brilliant! And so true. According to Jon Fine at BusinessWeek.com, "2006 was the year of YouTube". The year of Wikipedia and lonelygirl15. And 2007 promises to be more of the same, as internet businesses find new ways to wrangle true value from the enormous -- and rapidly growing -- amount of  user generated content on the web. In this context, it's worth reviewing what New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki wrote in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds":

... in most [experiments] the members of the group were not talking to each other or working on a problem together. They were making individual guesses, which were aggregated and then averaged ... the group's guess will not be better than that of every single person in the group each time. In many (perhaps most) cases, there will be a few people who do better than the group.

In other words, in order for the wisdom of crowds to work, each member of the crowd has to think (or vote, write, review, rate, etc.) independently. It's independent and unique content that makes the web useful and compelling, not the law of averages. In her blog "The 'Dumbness of Crowds'", Kathy Sierra points out that:

By "crowd", [Surowiecki] was referring to a collection of individuals. Individuals whose independent knowledge (and "independent" is a key word in what makes the crowd "smart") is aggregated in some way, not smushed into one amorphous Consensus Result.

Which brings us to the year 2007 and Wize.com. By collecting more independent product reviews from more sources, Wize is committed to leveraging the wisdom -- not the dumbness -- of crowds. We are convinced that using these independent reviews to generate ratings is a better way to do product research. And while we're actively looking for ways to improve our Wize Rank algorithm -- and our customer experience -- We've already used the wisdom of crowds to make better purchase decisions fast. We'd love to hear what you think.

Consumer ratings and reviews influence active web shoppers

According to Forrester research from October 2006, more active web shoppers have used “consumer ratings and reviews” than any other content. This is closely followed by “for-sale listings with seller ratings,” most likely found on eBay. According to our own research, active web shoppers tend to start their product research at Google or eBay, filtering results until they feel that they’ve found the right product, price, and store.

With the vast amount of content available online, it’s fascinating to think of consumer ratings and reviews as being the most critical. There are multiple reasons for this, including:

Consumer ratings and reviews humanize our purchases, and are more easily understood than product specifications. Endless lists of product features can be mind-numbingly boring, and difficult to understand. Consumer reviews and ratings help people understand how a product works in the context of real life. They are often filled with emotional responses to products, which are both helpful and compelling. I bought the Canon PowerShot not because of its 6.2 megapixels, but because of what those megapixels help me to do.

Active web shoppers are distrustful of ads and corporate messaging. Want to find the best flat panel TV? Don’t ask Sony – they’ll probably recommend their own without doing a whole lot of competitive analysis. Customers have become increasingly distrustful of ads and sponsored product reviews and ratings. When making a purchase decision, they’re more likely to trust each other – in the form of user ratings and reviews – than any single source.

Many services are popping up online to help customers understand and use customer reviews to help make purchases decisions. Wize is uniquely positioned because of the way we factor user ratings and reviews into our Wize Rank rating system.

Are fewer choices better?

A recent post on Bokardo by Josh Porter brought up some interesting points about choice and decision-making. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, spoke at the User Interface Conference in Cambridge MA this month. Josh attended the conference and quoted Barry in his blog as having said:

People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.

Schwartz’ statement is especially relevant when placed into the context of e-services that require sorting and sifting information to find specific content: online shopping, news portals, or media sharing sites are good examples. In the course of finding what they’re searching for users and consumers end up settling on experiences, content, or products not because it’s exactly what they’re looking for, but because it was fast and “good enough.” Josh legitimately claims that settling isn’t an indicator of sloth, but a natural way to prioritize the amount of time spent on 1 of the 400 decisions an average person will make in the course of the day.

According to Josh:

It doesn’t take much to discover the ramifications of Schwartz’ observation. We choose politicians based on if we’ve heard of them before, not if they have the best record. We choose computers if we use the same kind at work, not if they are the best at helping us get stuff done. We choose movies that get high ratings, not if they’re the most important movie for us to see. Many times it’s OK if it’s not the best choice, but it’s the one we’re most comfortable with.

Settling for mediocrity might have been the case in the past, but new ways of evaluating and organizing information make it possible for the quickest and the easiest choice to be the best one too. As users create, evaluate and rank content they add to its existing value. Banking on the collective wisdom of users to evaluate and rank content decreases the time involved in the decision making process and provides fewer better results to the user.

High-quality content inevitably filters to the top of the heap. Whether one is searching for a particular episode of the Daily Show on YouTube, learning about news before its breaks on Digg, or finding the best DVD player to buy on Wize a person can rely on their online peers to provide better results. The future is not in more choices, but fewer and better ones that make the decision process easier, quicker, and ultimately more accurate.

Shopping for the perfect thing, or looking for the best deal?

From Kate Newlin’s Shopportunity!, page 66:

Wal-Mart’s impact is not simply to grind brands that try to please them into dust. It also seeks to claim the higher ground of “consumer friend” through its “everyday low pricing,” all the while searching the globe for the cheapest, okay merchandise, regardless of how or where or by whom it was made.

We respond to their logic. Why? Because we allow ourselves one bargain at a time to lose our ability to evaluate the relative merits of a gallon of pickles at whatever price. We have become addicts, based on genuine changes of biochemistry. We no longer search for the perfect “thing.” We’re trolling for “the best deal.”

Using Wal-Mart to define all that is currently wrong with retail shopping is nothing new—it could almost be considered trendy. But Shopportunity! does more than take shots at the retail giant. Shopportunity! is about our endless quest for savings and about what it’s cost us individually and culturally. It’s a book I’m sure I’ll return to.

It’s scary to read the excerpt above in the context of online shopping, where Wal-Mart is just one of the many businesses competing for your shopping basket. What happens to customer loyalty when your competitors are a single click—instead of a parking lot—away? The service industry looks more and more like something from “the good old days”; our kids will use our stories about the local hardware store to prove that we’re old and out of touch.

The Shopportunity! excerpt above also speaks to something that feels a lot less anachronistic, but is often conspicuously missing in action—the desire for great, lasting things that we love and enjoy, things that say more about us than “we got the best deal”. And that’s our goal at Wize, to help people find the best products fast. Not the cheapest products, and not the best deals, although customers who submit reviews certainly have overall product value in mind. We use Wize Rank and the Wize100s to find products that inspire us, and products that will last. Because we’re buying MP3 players and baby strollers, not pickles.

Good reviews or bad reviews: which are more compelling?

At Wize, we spend a lot of time thinking about customer reviews and expert reviews, how they can be most beneficial to customers, and how businesses use them to drive traffic to their websites, stores, offices, etc. Generally, we agree that manufacturers and restaurant owners prefer it when they get good reviews. But what drives traffic to online retailers who sell products they don't manufacture? Are customers more compelled to read positive reviews or negative ones?

Our working theory, based on our own experience, is that bad reviews are a lot more compelling than good ones. For example, I know that most people love their iPods. But finding the person who hates theirs can be very revealing. Is the negative review good for Apple? Maybe not. But is it good for  Amazon.com?

We'd love to hear what you think. Do you tend to read more positive reviews or more negative ones? Why?

Fewer search results simplify product research

Search engines providers and online retail portals have been working to shorten the amount of time and effort spent on Internet searches since the Internet began, innovating clever methods of retrieving the most relevant information as quickly as possible. Google’s link-based search results model, for example, replaced conventional search queries. Emerging as yet another paradigm, we’ve seen the rise of social bookmaking sites like digg and del.icio.us that ask users to sort and rank content.

Regardless of the means, the goal of the medium is to present consumers/users with exactly the information queried as quickly as possible, while simultaneously ensuring that it is of tremendous depth and quality. The immediate access to a large amount of relative information is what makes Wize unique in the online shopping and consumer research field. For a comparison, take a look at the results of some popular product searches run though Google.com, Become.com and Wize.com.

DVD Players	12,000,000	6,378,048	201
iPod	391,000,000	27,422,454	41
Camcorders	165,000,000	7,693,230	242
Coffee Grinders	4,010,000	248,580	48
Air Conditioners	11,900,000	571,056	38
Disclaimer: All data pulled from their respective web sites as of 10/07/06.

By providing fewer search results Wize makes it easier to get started on product research by presenting immediate access to relevant information. In traditional product research methods the information is there, but a user has to work harder (and expend more time) to find it.

What sets Wize apart is that we tap the human element, not bots, to provide fewer “smart” results to minimize the search process. Fewer results to comb through means consumers receive exactly the requested information as a starting point; from there, Wize allows access to scores of reviews (more than 500 on some products).

Wize makes it easy to conduct product research by presenting customers with exactly the content they want, immediately.

The importance of trust

As passé as it is it may sound, I think it’s worth mentioning here: as more information continues to become digitized, and as digital information continues to outpace traditional mediums, the challenge becomes not gaining access to information, but finding ways to quickly obtain and sort though relevant results. The volume of information is no longer the limiting factor, but instead the availability of a person’s time. Who wants to spend hours combing through product and user reviews from scores of different sources to find the all-around best DVD player? People want to find what they’re looking for in the least amount of time possible. The question of whom we trust to provide us with our information becomes the real lynch pin.

People organize themselves around sources of information they trust; online communities of friends that share similar interests and news organizations/media outlets that have earned reader/viewer credibility are two examples. Wize is placing the issues of trust, credibility and transparency at the center of our web offering by presenting our users with a portal that provides up-to-date, unbiased, and clear product reviews. Credibility is something that is earned, and so unlike other shopping sites Wize doesn’t preferentially rank products according to agreements with online retailers or advertisers—doing so would ultimately erode our credibility. Hundreds of thousands of customer reviews—almost 750,000—are accurately weighed against each other, Internet buzz, and the reviews of experts to provide users an idea of the true quality of their product choices. As web 2.0 e-commerce models continue to be test driven in various shapes, forms and configurations, we think that the foundation Wize is built upon will continue to endure and thrive because of the trust we place in a large number of diverse consumers, and because of the trust they place in us to accurately provide unbiased information.

Wize is Del.icio.us

Over the weekend Wize topped the Del.icio.us hot list (see the screenshot below). It’s exhilarating because it’s a telling sign that there’s momentum building behind our site, and that people are ready to embrace the idea of collective wisdom as an e-shopping tool.

Our secret sauce is keeping our product ranking process clear, transparent, and unbiased, and continuing the ongoing effort of streamlining our review aggregation processes—all the while squeezing every iota of accuracy out of our Wize Rank product review system. For a great springboard and/or first time Wize experience, check out the Wize100, it’s a great example of what we’re all about.