Wikio Shopping: a shopping-oriented digg-like on steroids

Wikio has just launched a new Shopping section on its french site. Currently focused on electronics / computing stuff, it has all the basics of a comparison shopping engine, with a few interesting improvements:

• Ratings brought by Wikio users for each product transform the category browsing into a powerful shopping-oriented Digg-like
• The product page (for instance the Canon EOS 400D product page) aggregates a lot of content / user-generated content into tabs, among them:
  • “News” lists articles crawled by Wikio (but it is not possible to directly rate those articles)
  • “Video” lists video from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, CNET…
  • “Photos” of the product are retrieved from Flickr
  • “Price” tab is a comparison prices module, with data coming from Kelkoo. It’s clearly a way for Wikio to monetize their trafic, even if it’s not their core business.
  • Accessories are available in a separate tab, which is smart.
• An affiliation program that targets bloggers has been launched, to let them display contextual offers based on the content of their blog. Again, it’s a smart move, as blogs is an important data source for Wikio.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article regarding the future of shopping-oriented digg-likes, predicting all the current actors will die once Digg launches its own shopping section. Digg didn’t do it yet, but Wikio has launched a pretty amazing product. It’s still an early version, not so focused on the community yet, but I’m sure they will find more synergies between the core Wikio product and this new Shopping section. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio, also co-founded Kelkoo a few years ago: he has a really good product vision, and I’m pretty sure the next versions of Wikio will amaze me (us).