Sprenzy quietly launched last week. Sprenzy works off of Shopping.com’s API. The company was co-founded by Chuck Lai, who was formerly in charge of MySimon’s product development (MySimon is a Shopping.com partner, so Chuck is fairly familiar with Shopping.com’s capabilities). Launching a site using Shopping.com’s API is not a big deal, happens every day, but there are a couple features on Sprenzy that are important to take note of because they significantly improve the user experience.
-Preventing unnecessary page loads/refreshes. Sounds little, but using AJAX/dhtml provides a much more pleasant user experience than clicking on a link and having to wait for a reload and search a whole page for the next link to click on. Sprenzy elegantly helped me along my shopping experience. Here’s an example. I clicked on Personal Audio under Electronics and the green module came up:
-My Lists – while the functionality at Windows Live Shopping (you can just drag the product to the list), SortPrice (shop, drag, and drop) are a little better, Sprenzy’s My Lists ranks up there with Yahoo! Tech’s Save for Later function. These lists make the current list offerings from most shopping comparison engines look completely antiquated in comparison. Clicking the +My List button next to any product on Sprenzy automatically puts the product on a visible list on the upper right hand side of the page as opposed to the common alternative which hides the list behind some account page. Doesn’t it make sense that your wish list or window shopping list is right there in front of you?
-Scharffen Berger Chocolate. Did Chuck know I have a slight chocolate addiction? Ok, the feature here isn’t chocolate, but it’s a pretty good shopping blog featured on the homepage (yesterday’s post happened to be about chocolate). Good to know that people are setting their inner blogger free! Lots of original content on Sprenzy’s shopping blog which will get picked up by the search engines…and surprisingly is pretty interesting to read.
There are a number of other features to take note of, but those made my top 3 list. Check out Sprenzy’s corporate blog for more information…a corporate blog…you know, for announcements (like the merchant center is down (Shopping.com) or we rolled back to a previous index (Shopzilla)) or cool new features. What a concept!
Doesn’t everyone have a slight addiction to chocolate!?! Thanks for the write up. I’m glad you enjoy reading the shopping blog. Depending on the topic, it does eat up time creating good content but the SEO benefits are well worth the effort.
congratulations chuck!
looking like the comparison shopping space is getting more crowded everyday with smarter.com, become.com, and viewscore.com etc.
-nick
[...] ar audience, you can then slowly rollout that experience on your main site. Related Posts Sprenzy Launches – August 31, 2006 Mpire in NYTimes – August 14, 2006 Sortprice – S [...]
[...] and Yahoo! Shopping are out there with good APIs that let entrepreneurs launch sites like Sprenzy, CrispyPath, or BrowseGoods. Not all of these affiliate sites will make it [...]
[...] and Yahoo! Shopping are out there with good APIs that let entrepreneurs launch sites like Sprenzy, CrispyPathCrispyShop, or BrowseGoods. Not all of these affiliate sites wi [...]