There are plenty of sites out there that encourage shopping, which is something I don't need much encouragement to do, so when I heard about StyleFeeder, I was a bit skeptical. But I was pleasantly surprised by a site that is truly useful in organizing my online buying, and also fun and easy to use.
StyleFeeder, aka "The Personal Shopping Engine," also lets you share your finds with the other users on the site, view and comment on their items, and rate items based on a simple one-to-five-star system. The StyleFeeder database presents you with products you may like, which you can then rate, prompting the site to learn your tastes and tailor recommendations to you. It's free to use, and other than a couple of banner ads, one on the bottom, its interface is clean and uncluttered.
It's not surprising that StyleFeeder sprang from the holiday shopping season. Founder Philip Jacob "literally got the idea by watching his wife Bea shop for Christmas gifts," said StyleFeeder V.P. of marketing, Dina Pradel. "She was sharing ideas with her girlfriends via email and IM, but the links kept getting lost, so he wanted to create a site where people could share what they were shopping for with other people."
One way you do this is to install a browser tool that lets you grab photos and make notes of items you like. I think the StyleFeeder people really nailed it when they picked the design for the mini-icon that installs into your browser toolbar: it's a bright, colorful little flower, and easy to spot when you're surfing the web and want to grab an item for your stylefeed. This could be the best mini-icon since the colorful Google Desktop swirl.
Stylefeeder walks you through the process well: after you click "Add Items," you are presented with a short video that clearly demonstrates how to use the icon to put things in your stylefeed. I first encountered difficulty installing the icon into my Firefox browser; it wasn't showing up after running the add-on program. Later I found a note in the site's "About" text about how with Firefox, you need to specifically designate a browser add-on as OK, and instructions on how to do that. But I think this note would be better placed right on the installation page, as the people who need it may not find the help text where it is now.
I decided to try out the browser tool while shopping for a new school backpack for my son. After finding the backpack I liked, it was easy to click the Stylefeeder mini-icon and add the big backpack (with both wheels and straps) to my feed. The next time I navigated to the StyleFeeder site, I saw the image of the backpack under "My StyleFeed," and knew it was now added to the mix of items on the site, where others could view and rate it.
In addition to using the browser icon to grab things you're interested in, another way to make the site work for you is to rate the items using the one-to-five star system. "We intentionally kept the rating system very loose so that people would use it in a way that was intuitive to them," said Pradel. "Our rating system is intended to express personal preferences - not as a customer review on sites like Amazon. Our recommendation engine has the ability to normalize ratings to uncover patterns...for example, you might be an extreme rater who always gives 1s and 5s, while I might be more middle-of-the-road, but we are still expressing similar feelings about the product."
This was good news to me, as I had rated a dog carrier a "1," and later worried it was unfair to the carrier, as it wasn't that I didn't like the bag, but simply that I don't have a dog. But Pradel assured me, "Actually, the way you rated the dog carrier is exactly right - some people click one star to express non-interest, others click the "no" symbol to the far left to say that they aren't interested in things in this category."
Although products in the stylefeeds of users are part of what populates the site's engine, there are more than 14 million items in its product catalog, the majority of which haven't been rated by users, Pradel noted. "We've been working on improving our techniques in recommending unrated items, so if you search for something specific, you're still seeing results that are tailored to your tastes, even if we don't have any user preference data on that item," she said. A personalized search appears on top of the items recommended to you, so you can enter a word like "shoes," and the site will recommend some it thinks you will like.
Another way to keep Stylefeed with you while you "Windows"-shop is with the Personal Stylefeed sidebar, a menu that pops up to the left when you click the separate "PS" mini-icon in your browser toolbar. A freaky and fun feature there is "StyleTwins": click on that, and it presents you with a list of people who "shop like you," including their photos on the right. (One of the people like me has the keywords "punk" and "necklace " under her profile, which I found amusing.)
You can comment on another user's profile, and send each other messages on the site. Users also can "watch" other people that they know, or whose taste they admire, to see what they are shopping for, notes Pradel. This reminds me of the voyeuristic shopping fun to be had on eBay by searching for a specific eBayer and seeing what they've bought or sold.
Stylefeeder's blog, The Tastemaker Diaries, "is written by some of our users," said Pradel. "We had topic-oriented groups at one point, but they were hard to police and didn't get much traffic."
So far, the site is catching on: "We've had quite a year in terms of growth, considering we've only had a full team and funding in place since June of 2007," said Pradel. "We have more than 880,000 registered users of the site, and our Facebook application has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times, making us by far the largest shopping app." The company has six full-time employees, including an MIT PhD who is an expert in collaborative filtering.
Search and ratings are the most popular features for the average user, according to Pradel, but my favorite use of the site is simply as a neat and easy way to keep a running list of things online I may want to buy. And since I prefer to shop online, which has been only reinforced by high gas prices, it's handy to have a centralized place for my wants and needs. (OK, well most of the time they are wants).
Speaking of which, I was worried the tools on the site would lead to rampant buying on my part, but the ability to grab items to a list and review them later has actually allowed me to take the "pause" that is recommended for consumers after seeing an item they want on impulse.
But the backpack? It's mine.
