Apparently we Canadians take longer to commit to our online purchases than our American cousins, preferring instead to spend time researching online deals, looking up reviews, and educating ourselves before clicking away our money. This is according to the founders of
Wishabi.ca, a newly launched shopping service that is designed to help Canadians better understand the upfront costs of goods shipped in from the US and provide the tools for users to cooperatively research the value of sales and online deals. CEO Wehuns Tan says that he and his staff performed a study that suggests that while the difference between US and Canadian currencies can often make it look like US stores have the lower price and so the better deal, once you factor in shipping and customs fees, it works out that only approximately 20% of those US deals actually turn out to offer the better price. The goal of Wishabi is to list every product that is available online to Canadian shoppers, in Canadian dollars, with hidden fees listed up front, for a fair comparison that factors in more than just price, and allows shoppers to work together to figure it all out.
The service only just launched last night, and so while it has many listings of online offerings, will still take awhile to complete its database. You can search for any item by keyword and it will bring up a selection of offerings, all converted to Canadian dollars and with listings for shipping costs and import fees. You can sort that list based on price, but also value, a listing determined by Wishabi themselves and displayed using a green bar. The company says they have a patent-pending process that can evaluate an online deal by factoring in return policies, retailer creditability, incentives, and other aspects. Beside each listing is a green bar, the closer the bar is to full, the better the deal, although the issue for many users will be in understanding the information behind that bar as clicking or hovering over it doesn't tell you what those factors are, its essentially just a way of flagging a listing to tell you that it deserves looking at with more detail than just price.
Users can create wishlists which work to both save your shopping research as well as to give Wishabi feedback as to what kinds of items their users are looking for and to drive them to search for and add more listings for that kind of item to their database. At launch they have chosen to focus on adding listings for consumer electronics and household items, but if the wishlists show a strong interest in another category of goods, then their staff will work quickly to meet that desire. To help drive that process, they have established a program for dealhunters, if you can find a better deal for an item they have listed, they will give you a cash pay-out, either through cheque or paypal deposit and it will be added to their listings.
Although Wishabi has partnered up with several Canadian and American retailers, including Canadian Tire, Sears, and The Bay. they have the ability to grab listings from any online retailer, as long as their goods are available to Canadians. The one condition to that is clothing, the fashion of which is too subjective for their green bar system. Wishabi says they will be adding a new appraisal system for comparing the value between clothing purchases within the next one hundred days.
The wishlists also serve another use. Wishabi is integrated with Facebook, meaning you can sign into your Facebook account through the Wishabi website, your friends list will show up within the Wishabi page and you can give access to your wishlists to your friends. The idea being that you can keep each other informed as to the kind of items you are searching for, so that should a great deal appear online for a product you've been hunting for when your offline, one of your online friends can notice it and alert you. Not only can you shop and research for yourself, but also for your friends. The company plans to offer a similar connection with other social networks, including Twitter, over the course of the next few months.
Having just launched, it will take awhile before Wishabi can prove its worth, but it explore some interesting ideas and smart features, making it a website to watch.
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