New York-based ShopWiki, the shopping startup that’s appeared on Mashable twice now, is relaunching today with a redesigned site ready for the holiday season. As mentioned previously, ShopWiki is a user-edited shopping site that searches for products around the web, allows you to upload video reviews and search by color. It was, however, poorly designed, and the new release goes some way towards fixing that.
They’ve also improved their search: they’re now crawling 120 million products from more than 180,000 online stores, but only within the US - that’s up from 120,000 stores during their launch in April. They also added 500 more wiki buying guides since April’s launch - 1,500 compared to a launch total of 1,000. More new stuff includes a “My ShopWiki” section where you can create a wishlist, save searches and set price alerts. There’s also a “Shopping Assistant” extension for Firefox that automatically fills in forms while you’re shopping (this type of functionality is already built into many browsers, however), and the ability for merchants to register on the site.
I’ve always thought ShopWiki was incredibly basic and required a lot of effort on the part of the user, but perhaps they’re making small steps in the right direction. Rivals include ProductWiki, which works slightly differently: users submit items, rather than having the site auto-populated by a web crawl.
