Yahoo! Shopping Gift Finder - More...

I want to take this time to discuss the Gift Finder we created along side a great Y! partner, ChoiceStream out of Cambridge, Mass. The Gift finder was built as a collaboration between Yahoo! Shopping, the Yahoo! Personalization team, and ChoiceStream. It was one of the better collaborations I've been involved with and I feel lucky to be the Product Manager for this feature.

First here's a nice article from SearchEngineWatch about the tool. Chris Sherman really gets it.

We felt there is a need for a compelling gift recommendation tool on-line and this partnership made a lot of sense to us. Currently there are only maybe one or two other solid personalized gifting sites or features out there and they are primarily smaller operations. Gifts.com being one of them with a lot of potential. Amazon and big e-tailers don't really address this issue of personalized gift recommendations, and smaller boutiques such as Red Envelope have a good, but limited selection.

(See my previous little rant about Amazon and gifts here)

Yahoo Shopping has over 60,000,000 products from over 200,000 stores. We wanted to create a tool that delivered our customers the best recommendations for gifts from our huge catalog while providing a trusted gift giving experience. Fulfilling a need that traditional search can't quite provide at this time.

Trust is key. We wanted to make sure that the stores had a high merchant rating with a variety of positive reviews from a wide range of users and for some a high name recognition value. This is critical. The last thing people want, is to purchase a gift and not have it delivered as promised or described.

The tool works by using algorithms to map our product catalog and the product's attributes to occasion, gender, age, relationship, and lifestyle data provided by the user. It's a psychology algorithm of sorts that has an understanding of the importance of brand, price, and product type and their relationship to these lifestyle selections. This is the power of ChoiceStream's technology.

We considered several options of how to present the interface. We could have done a single page dynamic form, used traditional form elements, added more features and asked more questions. We could have started with age and gender instead of occasion, or another attribute first. We considered many options... but it all came down to ease-of-use and making the experience as personal as possible. We were left cold by other attempts to provide gift giving help; this tool had to be Yahoo, it had to be human and warm. We wanted the user to picture the person they are finding the gift for. More often than not, that person is very close to the giver, so making that connection was important. We also wanted to place an emphasis on trying this on yourself at some point. If not first, then at some point while experiencing the feature. We felt that this was the best way for the user to get an understanding of how relevant the results were. The user may not know that the gifts we recommend for their grandmother are solid, but if it works for themselves then perhaps other recommendations are just as reliable.

Once the user gets results, the lifestyle can easily change through a little Ajax widget and the recipient can be saved in line for one click results later on. The user can also save products to a personalized list (Saved Products) to access later or share with others.

So we set out to make a simple, comfortable gift giving tool that can be used to provide recommendations for products, product categories, brands, and even stores. At the very least it's a valuable brainstorming tool that does the work of weeding out millions of products. At best, it hits the nail on the head for a quick and easy gift giving experience. It's unique to the web by its breadth and depth and its ease-of-use-- we're very proud of it.

But we're not done. We launched as a beta. GA is a ways off. We're using this time to learn about gift giving behavior, try new features, get more personalized, and every week learn from this behavior to provide better results.

Please give it a try. We are open to suggestions. Anything and everything. It's important for us to get your feedback, we really want to make this an indispensable tool for people looking to get that special someone something special.

Thanks!
-beach