Shopoon becomes PureShopping

Shopoon is a french shopping engine launched in 2006; and focused on fashion apparel and home decoration products. This week, Shopoon relaunched itself as PureShopping.  New brand and a new version of the site that is really interesting as it breaks with the “classic” aesthetic of shopping engines / price comparison websites. Here are below a few notes of my own.

Overall design

• Uses shades of gray – then each domain (“Men“, “Women“, “Beauty“…) brings its own color – overall, I find the design works very well.
• Sitemap in the footer – trendy for blogs, unusual for shopping engines.
• Clear emphasis on the newsletter – at the top and bottom of the site, on each page.

Site header

• The new “pure shopping” logo is quite disappointing compared to the overall quality of the site. Don’t like the typo at all.
• The global search form is pretty “invisible” in the new design. Focus on navigation rather than search?
• A tab navigation highlights the main domains (“Men“, “Women“, “Beauty“…); each tab opens a huge dropdown showing sub-categories (classic), highlighting some products (nice), showing color trends (very nice) and top brands… Really nicely executed!!!

Homepage

• “classic” caroussel module. ”Shopping of the day“,  ”New products“ modules presenting a selection of products. “Top products“, “Top brands“, “Top searches” modules at the bottom…
• Homepage pretty efficient, bringing significant value to reload it each day.

Search result pages

• Nice breadcrumb that embeds filter selection.
• Filters above results ; icons to represent the filters available on all categories (price, color, brand…); very inspired solution to select values for each filter (very graphical, sliders for price selection, lightbox effect to show filter values).
• However, the display of filters specific to the current category could be improved (and not many choices to filter).

• Grid view as default view. Results use the full width of the site. Emphasis on images. Only the basic infos on the grid view (title, price, rebate, brand, merchant name).
• Interesting: all offers don’t have a “view offer” button leading to the merchant website; those offers without “view offer” button are still clickable and lead to a product page detailing the product. I understand the intent is to build an inventory of all products, including products for which PureShopping doesn’t currently have offers from merchants; but the way it is implemented is pretty confusing.

Product page

• Social tools to share this product (blog this product, send to Facebook / Yahoo!…, send to a friend); seems anecdotical as there is no social emphasis on the site.
• Products from the same brand, products from the same category…
• This product page is interesting; a shame it is only available only for some products (see above)…

You have understood: I really like this new site; I find it quite inspired (and inspiring) despite the few areas that need improvements. Well done, Shopoon team!