VentureBeat

Whatsbuzzing is a Silicon Valley start-up with a new take on online shopping.

It wants to let you window-shop online. It has just launched.

Anand Jagannathan, the founder, dropped by to show us the product of the San Jose company. Most leading online shopping sites are useful if you know exactly what you are looking for, he said. But what if you want to buy a gift for Father’s Day, and you think you want to browse for men’s clothes for fall fashion, but you don’t really have your mind made up? That’s what Whatsbuzzing wants to help you with. “No one else does browsing,” Anand declared, as began his demo of the product for us. Below is a screenshot of the home page (click to enlarge), where you start your searching.

To start with, in his testing (Beta) phase of the site, he’s drawing on information — including sales, and other offers — released from some 200 merchants. He is doing this via RSS. He pulls all this together, and introduces the latest Web 2.0 features to make the browsing experience as easy as possible. In the diagram below (click to enlarge), you’ll see on the bottom left hand corner a place to keep track of the “tags” you are assigning certain sites as you browse. For example, if you find a good shoes site, you can tag it “shoes.” You can choose to share your findings with others, and likewise, you can access the tagging others have done.

Above that box, there is a pane called your “browse list,” which is designed to help you narrow your search to those categories or merchants that you are interested in. The “Merchants” tab displays the list of all merchants who are registered with the service, by category. The “Favorites” tab displays the list of merchants that you have identified as your favorites, and that way you can keep track of the various sales and other offers that your favorite store is making (this is done via RSS).

He is still playing with the best way to present information. For now, when we search for Father’s Day gifts, it defaults to its first merchant, The Sharper Image. You see other tabs for other merchants atop, which let you browse other merchants, but we’d rather have a long scrollable list (which, we note, Anand had originally had, before this latest change) with some sort of relevance ranking. That way, we don’t have to take the time to click away from the default merchant, which may be of no interest to us.

He makes money if someone clicks through from his site to buy a product from a merchant (there is typically a 5-8 percent kickback referral commission). It will be tough for this company to get visibility, given its arrival at a time when there are so many other competitors. The trick at this point will be to make it super useful and to become the place where people really want to browse. It has some way to go in the selection that it offers, but at least it has planted a seed in our head as a place to consider when we are at a loss about what to buy.

Right now, the site makes you register if you want to use any advanced feature, such as adding tags, or picking your favorite merchants. It makes you select a username and password, and asks for a first name and an email address. Once you tag things with your own handle, your wife or kids can go to the site and look for the things you’ve identified as interesting — and then buy them.

Anand is a veteran, having founded three companies, Banyan Systems, Reach and Responsys. Kriyari is the name of the company running the Whatsbuzzing product. He said his previous companies have all raised venture capital, but that this time he is going it alone.

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