ProBargainHunter.com

Ever since I wrote about PowerReviews in October 2006 I have not heard about the review-aggregating startup that much, until today when I discovered the fact that they did launch their promised shopping portal after all. Bazzillions is the name.

As much as I liked the original idea of in-sourcing the product reviews from merchants in exchange for the leads the merchants get back from PowerReviews, just as much I don’t like how the shopping portal that is supposed to generate these leads is implemented. I think it really lacks structure and looks somewhat incomplete.

OK, without going into too much of a rhetoric, let’s get hands on. Bazzillions is a fresh site so to avoid glitches caused by lack of reviews I look a look at “Video Cameras and Camcorders”, the category PowerReviews have been working with for some time. I have then used the links to the left to further narrow it down to Sony Camcorders thus filtering out professional equipment and other brands.

What I have as the result is a list which doesn’t even have a camcorder as the first product, it is a carrying case made by Sony (see the screen shot above). OK, could be a bug. Looking closer I notice that the products are sorted in a strange fashion. The ratings have a tendency to go down but sometimes you can find a lower rated product up in the top and vice versa. There could be some sense in it but I just don’t get it.

Mislabeled products

I quickly scrolled down the list and what I found is a camcorder labeled “Sony High Definition Handycam Camcorder” which judging by the image is the HDR-CX7 model I currently have. Obviously a search by “HDR-CX7” doesn’t produce any result since the product is mislabeled.

Very few merchants

Another thing that disappoints is the limited number of merchants listed offering the products. I understand these are the partners who provide Buzzillions the reviews however with major retailers missing I feel reluctant to use Buzzillions for my shopping. I might well be missing out on the best deal out there - can’t afford that to happen. ;-)

Buzz Guide is ineffective

And the last, the green box in the middle labeled “Buzz Guide” simply doesn’t cut it. I understand the theory. PowerReviews makes merchants ask these questions to their customers as a part of after sale survey and then uses the answers to generate product recommendations on Buzzillions based on your preferences. The result however is somewhat mixed to say the least. What lacks is the quantitative ranking of the products based on the qualities I select. I.e. when I click on “Comfortable to operate” tag I want to know how well the recommendation stands (how many people made it) for each product without having to click on the “Compare” button and examine the aggregate of all the qualities. Without it the results are too unpredictable.

Conclusion

The bottom line is, the idea is great but the implementation has a long way to go before it becomes a place of choice for shopping, at least for me. If all you are looking for is quality reviews on technology products, I recommend SmartRatings, a site I recently reviewed. Retrevo is another alternative. They are not trying to accomplish as much in guiding you (so far they only quantify overall product features vs. price) but the implementation is so much better.

Over the past month I have been playing with Shopzilla API on one of my pet projects and so far the results are impressive. I like the quality and number of product offers I am able to get using the API and also how fast the results are fetched. In fact I have been so happy with it that I decided to extract some of my code and make a WordPress plugin out of it.

Shopzilla is very good at comparing product prices and what this plugin in essence does is it embeds price comparison results for a single product into your blog post (see the sample below).

The merchant logo and the price are links that lead to the product page at the merchant. Shopzilla Publisher Program is a PPC kind and so each time your visitor clicks on these links to check the product you as a publisher earn a small commission form Shopzilla.

Before you can use the plugin on your blog though you will need to apply for a publisher account with Shopzilla. When you are approved you will get assigned a publisher ID and API access key which you need to enter at the plugin configuration screen.

At the same screen you can configure the number of product offers to display and default placement ID (Shopzilla’s alternative to Google’s channels). A README.txt file is included with the package that explains how you can further set up and use the plugin on your blog. To download it click here and save the file at your computer.

If you end up using Shopzilla on your blog, please tell me in your comments what you think about it. I love to hear your feedback!