Review of TheFind

TheFind is a new actor in a crowded market, but they claim to reinvent shopping search. When I heard of TheFind a few months ago (by reading TechCrunch), I was really impatient to discover this new service: it’s always good to see innovative challengers to established players. So I was really happy to see the beta was launched a few days ago. I suppose my expectations were a bit too high, because I’m a bit disappointed.

TheFind doesn’t rely on paid merchands, but crawls the web and automatically extracts “over 150 million products” from over “500,000 stores“. That’s really a lot compared to other shopping engines (Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping…). In that way, they are very similar to Windows Live Product Search for instance.

But at the same time, TheFind tries to provide a user interface that is similar to Shopping.com or Yahoo! Shopping: grouping of offers using SKU, comparison pages… Trying to mix those two approaches is quite innovative, but I think they should have gone further. Here’s what I don’t like:

• Comparison pages are not enough relevant. When I searched for a Canon EOS 5D, I got 162 offers, with a price range between $2,149 and $4,679: I clicked on “check prices” to get description of those offers, but all I got is the merchant name and the price. When I clicked on the highest price, the offer was a bundle (Canon EOS 5D + two lenses). I want to see the details of the offers directly on TheFind, without clicking on each merchant.
• Too few options are available to filter results. We miss the classic drill-down navigation to filter results. The only option is to filter by merchant or by price, but I’d like to be able to filter at least by brand.

What I like:

• The look&feel. Finding a product is really straight forward. The products are displayed with big pictures, AJAXified pop-ups are used to display descriptions. The color palette (red, orange) is very friendly.

I really hope TheFind will upgrade their comparison pages and bring drill-down filtering: it will then become a real and serious alternative to other shopping engines.