ReviewGist - Intelligent comparison shopping
ReviewGist is a startup based out of Gurgaon, India. ReviewGist is a review and price comparison website, allowing you to view reviews and best prices of the product, from a lot of review and shopping websites in India. ReviewGist is one of the few Indian startups to get a mention on TechCrunch.
The first thing one would notice is the extremely neat, intuitive and professional layout of the website. Many more review comparison sites seem to exist today, the popular ones being compareindia.com and wize.com. Many dedicated online shopping sites also perform price comparisons. However, where ReviewGist stands out is that it claims to do semantic processing of all the different reviews it crawls for a particular product and performs the rather difficult task of converting highly subjective reviews and opinions/comments into purely objective points, categorized as “positive” or “negative”.
Ex. If a review mentions “the phone has a good flash”, it would automatically detect that the reviewer is talking POSITIVE about the “flash feature” and would group the review appropriately, which is pretty innovative. You can however make out that some level of plain keyword matching and human intervention has also gone in behind the scenes.
ReviewGist does not provide any reviews of their own. The entire website is driven by aggregating data from external websites. The layout and look and feel of the website might give you a false impression that the website performs a comprehensive review of all products in that segment. This however may not always be true. Moreover, the number of categories are also restricted to certain pre-defined but usually popular ones.
The debate over such summarized and concise reviews over a detailed analysis of the product from trusted websites like CNET is totally justified. When making a big purchase, one might be tempted to read a comprehensive writeup about the product rather than tidbits about the product from various resources. However, it can be argued that one review site may not cover all aspects of the product in equal detail and may or may not be biased towards a particular product.
The basis of comparison provided by ReviewGist may not always be satisfactory enough to decide which of the two products is better. Say, you cannot compare digital camera’s solely by how good their flash, battery life, megapixels etc. they have. Some finer points regarding the camera and subtle advantages and disadvantages of the product may be completely ignored by a comparison website simply because they do not provide a basis of comparison. Despite all the comparisons, I am still tempted to click on the reviewers links and read the detailed article as well.
Online shopping has not really picked up that much in India so far so I am not sure how useful it is to provide price comparisons from various online vendors. Most people would use it to get a good idea of the best deal they can get when they negotiate a deal offline.
Overall, a good consumer product discovery & research site. Gist of all expert opinions at one place, making shopping decisions simple, fast, accurate and authoritative.
Review written by Gaurav Gupta
Amit Ranjan on May 7, 2008
Any hints about revenue model… how is this monetizable…
One problem I see with this space is that it pitches you directly against the ecommerce biggies like ebay… since they all have shopping comparison buils as an djunct to the online purchase process itself. How does reviewgist plan to counter that?
nishant on May 7, 2008
Thanks Gaurav for the detailed post.
Amit - the monetization model currently works on an affiliate basis with the participating merchants. These channels are pretty well defined in the US, however they are also shaping up in India pretty fast.
eCommerce biggies like eBay are definitely in the competition - however our understanding is that research comes much earlier in the shopping process and we seek to position ReviewGist in that segment.
Brijesh on May 8, 2008
Ooops stumbled on this site… nice!
Though I don’t am not in the vantage point to comment on this but as a consumer I do not understand what ‘extra’ or ’special’ (call it differentiator, if you will) will ReviewGist offer.
The technologies that are able to ‘aggregate’ data from web are going to challenge the intermediaries. Stuffs that aggregate meaningful data will have great impact in next gen Web. I guess, ReviewGist wants to position itself there.
Siddharth on Jul 29, 2008
I do see that the information presnted is superficial and useless. If I want to get get a camera review, I will go to dpreview and not reviwgist.