Buykee unveils social shopping for consumer electronics

Written by Luyi Chen on December 27, 2006
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BuykeeChristmas has almost gone, but Chinese shopping season just started. Shopping activity is not single anymore. Lots of companies has been exploring social shopping ideas. Buykee, the latest player in this market, launched a third-party consumer electronics feedback community in Christmas. They said the service will formally launch in Jan 2007.

Buykee was founded early this year in Shanghai. Then it moved to Hangzhou in July. Before it launched public beta, this service has got much buzz. But it seems no one got the right idea what Buykee was going to do.

It currently has two main features. One is to bookmark products that you are paying attention to. The other is to share reviews of the products. But this is a bit too simple. Users don’t get the ideas where to buy these products and which vendor currently is offering the lowest price. If any product is missing, users don’t have a way to add it themselves.

Today’s Buykee is quite similar to Donews IT, launched on Nov. 13, 2006. The latter is currently promoting itself with celebrity equipment list. The common feeling you will get after playing with these two services is that they are both way underdeveloped. After you bookmarked several products, you are almost done. Nothing attracts you to come back for the second time.

The other service Maayee, we profiled in November, seems to be driving away from social review market. Now they are more like a blog aggregation service. Aggregating blog posts is a shortcut to content collection. But the problem is no one is responsible for filtering them.

Service like Buykee actually just fit the social review aspect of social shopping (also known as social commerce). Other companies like Dianping, Douban and Myetone are also doing well in this market. You probably don’t think online music communities belong to this category but actually they are.

Social shopping means more. Before you look for product reviews, you probably should get the idea what you actually want to buy first. Social bookmark for products (including wishlists) are a good place to start, but this hasn’t been explored by Chinese company yet.

After you done with the research of product reviews from others, you need to find a place to make a good deal so as to save your hard-earned money. Smarter lets you compare prices from different vendors. Also you can often find coupon information in all kinds of classifieds.

Then comes the vertical search engine where you can find all those discount information and positive and negative feedbacks. Qikoo is a place to go.

We recently found a company called Smartclub. It has partnered with some services we mentioned above to establish a community based on its virtual points system.

Over all, social shopping is an interesting market to watch. It solved the problem that you want to know what others think about the product you are looking at and where’s the best place to make the deal. We need more such kind of services, and they should be more integrated and handy.

4 Responses to “Buykee unveils social shopping for consumer electronics”

  1. mark cripps on January 10th, 2007 11:07 am

    Does anyone have a any ‘feel’ for the size of social commerce in China … i mean revenues

  2. China Web2.0 Review » » Buykee Enters Dead Pool on April 18th, 2007 12:46 pm

    [...] Related Posts Buykee unveils social shopping for consumer electronicsDouban Launched Blog RecommendationMaayee looking into social review market [...]

  3. usome on August 12th, 2007 11:46 am

    这个网站怎么注册啊？

  4. 程序设计分享 on October 29th, 2008 4:48 pm

    我也不知道怎么注册，谁能靠知？

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