The online shopping comparison business will soon offer more choices with Market Insight Corp.’s March 30 launch of MyProductAdvisor.com, a consumer research tool that recommends products based on a shopper’s preferences and provides links to manufacturers’ sites.
MyProductAdvisor is different from other shopping comparison sites, because it ranks its product recommendations and only provides research without processing orders, says Richard Smallwood, founder and CEO of Market Insight. On other shopping comparison sites, he says, "you usually wind up with too few or too many products that are not ranked by suitability."
To use MyProductAdvisor, shoppers fill out a series of questions to indicate their preferences for particular types of products, using their mouse to click on their degree of preference for different attributes, then clicking on a button to see recommendations ranked by suitability. Filling out the questions can take either a few seconds or several minutes, depending on how many series of questions a shopper wants to answer.
Market Insight earns revenue from MyProductAdvisor by offering analytical reports to consumer products companies based on the aggregated data of the preferences and product choices made by shoppers who have used the site.
MyProductAdvisor has been running in a test mode since early February, generating 150-200 hits per day to each of its two product categories, digital cameras and automobiles, Smallwood says, adding that future categories will include PDAs and smart phones.
"Research shows that these are among the most confusing product categories for consumers to navigate and companies to master," Smallwood says. "Our goal is to focus My Product Advisor on complex product categories so we can help consumers and companies more effectively bridge the preference and communication gaps that exist between them."
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