Iglooo, a Pune based startup, has launched a price comparison website for books. You can search for a book based on title / author and they provide price comparison results from vendors like A1 books, First & Second, Landmark and Crossword. To purchase, you are redirected to the vendors website. Currently, they claim not to be making any money from referrals but that should change down the line.
In their pitch, they seemed to stress on their ‘clutter free design’. However, there’s a difference between no design and clutter free design and the latter doesnt necessarily mean the former. The design definitely needs some work from a usability perspective. For instance, if a book has no photo associated, display a default ‘no image’ thumbnail. Allow to sort results by title as well. If possible and available, include a brief summary of the book in the site results — you could use Amazon API or any knowledge available from public sources like Wikipedia for this. Use a horizontal line or border to easily demarcate the various listings in the results page.
In its current form, the site provides little value to an end user. Let me elaborate why:
For starters, you cant discover new books using the site. Just like music and movies, you dont necessarily know the title of every book you will like and want to read. Book discovery is an equally important aspect of such sites. Secondly, without the book summaries, I have to visit the vendors website, get an overview of what the book is about — if it doesnt interest me, come back to Iglooo’s result set and then rinse and repeat. As an example, say I’m searching for books related to startups. If I search for startup in the title field, the back & forth process on the results set just becomes too painful.
Few additional suggestions to the founders – get a logo developed ASAP if you are serious about building a brand (learnt it the hard way on StartupDunia). You also might want to consider an alternate name for the site — its too easy to spell it wrong in the url (there are 3 ‘o’s).
Although it needs a few tweaks, the service does have some potential.
Although I agree with most of the points raised by Pranav, I think the design is absolutely kick ass. Coming to discovering books, I do not understand what made you think this is a book recommendation engine. It clearly states, find books by author or title. And I think it does the job quite well on that. Discovering books based on tags would be a neat idea nonetheless and I hope they start this too. I am looking for a book’s cheapest price and I think this does it rather well. If I need to discover books or read summaries, I have amazon and a zillion other such sites.
So, I agree with some points raised here but overall, I think iglooo fits my needs quite well.
What is the use, if it does not add Flipkart?
@ Champak…
Maybe it addresses your unique needs. It is possible, there might be different behavior patterns. If I am required to visit amazon for book discovery and then iglooo for actual purchase, convenience value doesnt exist at all !
Of course, meta-searches are yet to make money, it is easier with the low cost base they work upon.
@Prasanna a.k.a Flipkart Fanatic – You’ll be pleased to know that as of last week we’ve added Flipkart
@Iglooo
You guys have to start caching popular searches and books. You can’t expect users to wait that long while you scour the middle earth.