Testfreaks - What's Your Product's Freak Score?
Update 4.5. at 16.20: After publishing the post on TestFreaks we heard that the company might have recently let several people go and currently run on 'founder team'. We contacted the company to clarify and got the following response from TestFreaks CEO, Kristofer Arwin:
Testfreaks, a Swedish based product reviewing site has slowly been gathering attention. It caught our eye from ArcticIndex. Testfreaks can be summed up to be the aggregator of review sites. It pulls in material from more than 4000 sources from 27 markets and aggregates those into one rank - Freak Score.
Testfreaks has been put together by the founders of Pricerunner.com, Kristofer Arwin, Magnus Wiberg and Martin Alexanderson. The founders have therefore plenty of experience from the online shopping market, which Testfreaks is in also. Their business model is to get small commissions from sales done through their links. This sort of model understandably needs traffic. Last October they had about 2 million visits a month, and according to Anton they currently roll around 4M visits a month. Testfreaks has also received a $3 million investment from Northzone last year, according to VentureBeat.
There is plenty of competition in the social shopping market at the moment. In TestFreak's case however, they mainly work with many of the other shopping sites to bring value for everyone. According to Anton Kuhta, who we had a little chat about the TestFreak site, they usually partner with at least one shopping site on each market to give their users the best possible price. They also work with other review sites - this is because TestFreaks brings in a lot of traffic to these sites so many want to work with them.
Perhaps companies that fall close by with TestFreaks at least from Finland are RunToShop and Fruugo. Both are some sort of aggregators and have similar kind of business models. It will be interesting to see how these companies will perform in the long run as social shopping is still an area that has yet proven itself. There's definitely a need for more collaboration among these companies world wide - there are untapped benefits for sure.
How do you see this part of the social shopping market? Do you use sites such as TestFreaks when making purchase decisions?
I usually don't use such sites. I checked out Fruugo, but being in Beta means they only had a limited amount of products I am shopping for (ultra light outdoor gear). I prefer forums for research and reviews of products I am in the market for, as often you establish some sort of relationship with other users and tend to trust their words more than the review of an unknown person.
However, if you spend enough time at those social shopping sites you also might be able to establish some sort of relationship with the other users. But not being a shopaholic I definitely prefer the forums and blogs, because they have more content than just reviews.
My $0.02
Agree stronly with you Hendrik on the fact that you tend to ask your friends and peers about recommendations. Just as I did. I tried out the TestFreaks site since I'm looking for a camera. After I found the camera profiles I was interested in, I posted the reviews to my Facebook site the let my friend to comment. And they did. See here http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=37004346&ref=profile
Before I used to ask my peer group in Jaiku and that has moved to Twitter and Facebook know even though I don't find the other two as good and knowledgeble a community as we had in Jaiku. The dynamics are different. And yes, I do use blogs too, but I normally find the right blogs by first asking some of my friends who I know is into whatever I'm looking for.
I think there there is a big demand for a functioning site to find reviews, but I haven't seen a working one yet. Jaiku was the best so far and TestFreaks, RunToShop and Fruugo (possible due to the lack of users and products at this point) don't come event close. I know I will always default to my friend whether it's via Facebook, Twitter, IM or just call them is irrelevant. Thus, the challenge to design a site with exactly the right people and dynamics has so far proven impossible from what I know.
Thinglink beta looks promising in this field.
http://www.thinglinkblog.com/2009/04/29/video-preview-of-the-beta/
Pasi,
We've been looking at it and agree, it does look promising. We'll certainly cover it in the neaer future.
alaTest (http://alatest.com) has similar BtoC sites but generates BtoB revenue as well. They distribute their reviews to eCommerce sites (SonyEricsson, Kelkoo etc.).
Seems like the more sustainable business model.