Amazon, Visual Shopping and BrowseGoods
Brian Smith over at Comparison Engines (who will be joining us at our Catalyst conference) just broke the news on BrowseGoods, a new Web 2.0 visual shopping interface that gives you a glimpse of where shopping may be heading. Not only is it more intuitive then paging through product listings but it’s also more fun.
BrowseGoods is an Amazon Affiliate and all the products are pulled from select Amazon categories (right now Shoes, Toys, Sports and Watches are supported). I would expect them to expand to more categories pretty soon and then take the concept to other Comparison Shopping sites.
It was pretty easy and fast for me to find a cool board game offered by one of our customers, Yellow Mountain Imports, and it appears to show all of YM’s products in this category separated by a small border (you can drag the product map to the right or left to look for similar items).
AmazNode is another cool example of leveraging Amazon’s comprehensive and well-structured product catalog and Amazon Web Services architecture to build a mashup. I would expect to see many more of those (Yahoo! Pipes is also something to monitor) and if you’re an online merchant you really want your products included in the Amazon database (yes, there’s a theme here …).