It’s been too long since I’ve posted on this product development blog. So here’s a quick update on what Peter and I been doing and have planned for Q1 2007. At the end of this month, Sprenzy will be six months old. Since our launch, we’ve been focused on bug fixes, SEO and content development for the Shopping Blog.
In early November, we added Amazon reviews on product pages when possible. We still need to improve the lookup process to match Amazon ASINs with SDCs product IDs. Mashing up Amazon data was the only significant enhancement in Q4 2006. The rest of the development was behind the scenes and not exposed in the UI.
Since we are a bootstrapped startup, we don’t have the resources to do much general marketing or SEM. And frankly, while we are proud of our work on Sprenzy, it’s still a commodity comparison shopping site that isn’t buzz worthy. So we’ve relied on SEO and minimal SMO to attract organic traffic. With this approach, it’s going to take time to build significant and consistent traffic levels, especially with a brand new domain.
We knew this to be the case and have always planned on adding social functionality to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. That’s why there’s an S shaped icon for social in front of the Sprenzy logo. We aren’t planning to be a social shopping site, such as Yahoo! Shoposphere, Kaboodle, Crowdstorm, ThisNext and so on. They are all good sites and we don’t want to compete in the social shopping space and we are definitely not going to be a YASN.
So what new functionality do we plan on releasing? It definitely has a social and community aspect. We are taking a proven and common feature found on many sites and improving it thru better interaction design/UI and appropriate web 2.0 3.0 concepts. Sorry for being vague but… that’s all I’m have to say about that. Hopefully, we can get into a private beta phase before the end of the month.
With the new functionality build out, we decided to complicate the process by also doing a redesign at the same time. We are tired of looking at the current design and color scheme. Don’t you think six months is long enough for the current design? There will be a radical shift in color palette when the new functionality is released, followed by UI enhancements.
That sums up our plan for Q1 2007. Then we may go global in Q2 2007? Releasing a site on another continent counts as going global, right? Look out for more announcements in the following weeks. If you have any suggestions for Sprenzy, we welcome and would appreciate any and all feedback.
Posted by: Chuck Lai
Posted in General
Tags productdevelopment, q12007, update
Every now and then an event puts everything in perspective for me. Today that event was the discovery of James Kim’s body. I used to work with James during my short time at CNET. I barely knew James since he worked on the editorial side of the house and I was on the product development side. My interactions with him were limited to friendly hellos as we passed in the hallway.
On Monday, I was ecstatic when Kati and the kids were found safe. I was hoping for a happy ending for the Kim family but sadly, James was not found alive. A tragic event like this really puts life in perspective. It seems so trivial to worry about blogging, new product features, SEO, site traffic, etc., when there are more important things in life, such as quality time with family and friends.
There are times in a work environment when everyone is on edge or stressed out over a missed milestone, a server going down or a Google dance. Just remember the majority of us aren’t saving lives. Some of us are simply building web sites. If we all take a step back and look at our work issues, it’s not worth wasting the energy to worry and stress over these relatively trivial issues. With a little perspective, you realize that there are more important things on which to focus your time and energy.
Life is so short and precious. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a tragic event to remind you of this fact. My thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to the extended Kim family.
Posted by: Chuck Lai
Posted in General
Tags cnet, jameskim, life, perspective
The next feature I want to discuss is My List. The My List functionality is in its simplest state right now. The feature allows you to save products to a list for future reference and the ability to compare those products.
To add a product to My List, simply click on the + My List button which can be found next to a product offer on almost every page. Each time you add a product to My List, you will see the product being added or receive a visible confirmation of product addition.
If you are on a Search Result page, Product Overview page when My List is not visible in the right sidebar, you can view your saved products by clicking on the My List link in the header (underneath Home & Garden navigation).
The primary reason we display a visible confirmation and show all the items in your list is to make sure you don’t forget what products are in My List. On other comparison shopping sites, it’s difficult to keep track of products selected to compare particularly when you are viewing product across multiple pages.
An important distinction I want to highlight is the ability to add any product from any category into My List.
The list on the left is useful if you are simply using My List to save products for future reference but if you plan on comparing those products it is comparing apples to oranges. In the near future, you will have the ability to save products to multiple lists, group similar products and share those lists with your friends.
In the mean time, the ability to save and compare any product from any category can be beneficial as shown in list on the right above. The saved products in the list are an LCD TV, an LCD monitor and an LCD projector which would be a valuable product comparison that you can’t perform on most other comparison shopping sites.
A unique aspect of our Product Comparison page is we provide more information than your normal product comparison page. On other sites, it’s typically just the product specs but on Sprenzy since we allow cross category product comparisons, we provide additional product information such as product descriptions and reviews. The show/hide links allows you to display only pertinent information.
If you are comparing more than four products, you will be presented a product nav bar which allows you to scroll through the next set of products to compare.
We plan on adding the ability to drag & drop and rearrange the comparison order shortly. Again if you have any feedback on My List or Product Comparisons, we love to hear it.
Posted by: Chuck Lai
Posted in Launch, Feature
Tags comparison, crosscategory, mylist
Now that we have launched the site, I want to highlight some features and user experience design on Sprenzy. The first feature is category filters.
Category Filters
Let’s start in the Watches category page (click on the images below to see the live page).
At the top of the page you are presented the key category filters (Price, Brand, Age and Gender, Strap Material, Style, etc.) for the Watches category. By selecting any filter, the product listings are refined by your selected filter. For every attribute you chose, we keep track of your selection in the Selected Filters box on the top, left of the page. In the example below, we have chosen Stainless Steel - Strap Material and Seiko - Brand filters.
If you don’t see your desired filter, you can Search Current Results by submitting a search term such as “sports”. All search terms are presented in quotes in the Selected Filters box. To remove items, simply click on the desired filter, the X in front of it or use the Remove All button.
One of our primary objectives on the category listing page was to prevent unnecessary page loads/refreshes. If you click on the Movement Type filter in the last column under Or Filter By, instead of loading a new page to present just 3 filter options, we pop it up in a green box. 
If the filter options in the green popup box don’t meet your needs, you can simply close the popup box instead of wasting a page load on most other comparison shopping sites. These green filter popup boxes are presented when you select any filter in the Or Filter By column or More Options…
If you have any feedback on this feature, let us know your thoughts. The next post will discuss the My List feature.
Welcome to Sprenzy! We have completed our private beta phase and have now made the site publicly accessible. Peter and I have been working on Sprenzy for the last 4.5 months and we are extremely happy to officially launch Sprenzy 1.0.
In our initial release of the site, we have implemented the core features of a comparison shopping site. These features include:
During the design process for the site, we focused heavily on user experience design. In follow-up posts, I’ll present some key highlights of our user experience design.
As I stated in a previous post, Sprenzy is an evolutionary comparison shopping site. The current features of the site make it a good launching point but we still have a lot of enhancements and new features to implement. Just to give you an idea of some the enhancements we have planned, I’ll list a few:
We welcome any feedback that you have on Sprenzy. So leave a comment or submit some feedback. If you are looking for the post archives from the last several months, you can find them at Sprenzy - A Startup Tale.
Now go start a shopping sprenzy!
