Deal Radar 2008: Wize Ranks Products

We profiled Tom Patterson, CEO of Wize.com last year. The site compiles both expert and user reviews and inserts them into a scoring algorithm to rank products. The site’s proprietary WizeRank gives each product a 1 – 100 score, utilizing collective wisdom ferreted from all over the web.

Wize did a first round of financing – $4 million from Mayfield Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners in January 2007.

The Company claims to have over a million product reviews from 7,151 different websites for 30,409 different products. Wize.com is a Quantcast top 5,000 site that reaches close to 1 million U.S. monthly uniques. Alexa ranking puts them at a traffic rank of 72,115. [I am not quite sure how these ranks reconcile, though, since of late, I find them increasingly more confusing and inaccurate.]

Wize is primarily a lead generation business, acquiring traffic based on the value of its service and providing customers access to stores where they can buy the products they want. Sites receiving these leads pay them for the traffic Wize sends over to them.

Wize is a good acquisition target for eBay or Amazon. By acquiring Wize, eBay, especially, can cut down on both its customer acquisition cost and dependency on Google, and offer a better shopping experience.

In many of my recent posts, I have highlighted that the entry-point to the web is changing, with brands that offer richer and deeper brand experiences for specific content taking mind share away. For Consumer Electronics, Cameras, and other Gadgets, Wize is one such brand that can develop into a meaningful alternative entry-point.

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008