We recently asked the question of where should you buy your electronics, and where is the best place for product reviews. A new service, called Retrevo, wants to be your one-stop location for all of those things. You’re probably wondering how they are going to have better reviews than sites like Newegg or Amazon, but it looks like they are going by the “if you can’t beat them, join them” philosophy.
Retrevo only focuses on electronic items, and they aggregate reviews from a lot of sites on the Internet. They group the reviews according to whether they were written by experts, such as CNet or PC World, and also by user reviews. They then give the average ratings for the products, and links so that you can continue to read the full review on the original site.
One of the things that I found really useful was that they also provide links to manuals and manufacturer information for some items. And did I mention the awesome product advisor that they have? At the bottom of the homepage you’ll see general product categories, such as this one for digital cameras, that will provide a shopping guide. In that guide they graph the general consensus of price vs. features for all the items in that category, and and then group the results into several different price points:
I was a bit skeptical of how good the service might actually be, but it might turn out to be useful. One of the things I like the most about it is that they provide links to the manuals online, which are frankly a pain in the butt to find sometimes.
Retrevo [via VentureBeat]
After browsing for a few minutes, I see one major flaw – the lack of accounting for the ages of reviews. I tried searching for “bluetooth”, and found a CNet comparison of headsets from 2005, plus a 2002 (!!) article on getting these newfangled bluetooth electronics to network. The dates weren’t in the list – I had to follow the link to find out they were ancient (by gadget standards).
The review aggregations suffer (albeit less) from the same flaw – several models of PDA they listed in the top 30 are only available from Joe Schmoe’s Used Gadget Shack. This is true of many of the price-comparison sites, but it’s often more readily apparent (either the number of retailers is prominent or you can sort by date of review).
That’s a really good point Joe. I hadn’t thought about how much the post date of a review affects how useful it actually ends up being. I’m guessing that it will continue to get better though, and in the future they will probably offer advanced sorting options.
Both points raised are good and legit. We observed some issus with the merchant feed we get from one of our partners. While we work with this partner to resolve the merchant quaification issue, we are putting a safeguad in place to minimize the impact of Joe Schmoe’s Used Gadget Shack. You should have a better experience in next couple of days.
And yes, advanced sorting options is on our roadmap. I can’t talk more, otherwise my product guy will kill me
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