The rumor tonight is that social shopping service Kaboodle has been acquired for $30M+ by Hearst. We profiled Kaboodle and other social shopping services back in December in our Social Shopping Faceoff. Our conclusion then was that Kaboodle leads the social shopping pack, with a clean UI and the most comprehensive feature set. It also appeared to have more traffic than the others. So Hearst bought the right one! Here's our review of Kaboodle:
When Kaboodle had only 20K active users, it managed to secure a partnership with eBay - and it became clear that this company was going to be a major player in the world of social commerce. Kaboodle offers a robust and simple set of features. Users can collect shopping items from many sites using the Kaboodle toolbar. The items can then be organized into collections, reviewed and shared with other users.
Each collection can be viewed as a list, grid, slideshow and collage. Of these, the first two are very useful - while slideshow and collage are more like eye candy.
Kaboodle nails the usability for key social features: it is really easy to copy a single item or a whole list, and it is also easy to rate items or the entire list. Finally, the search on Kaboodle works very well - making the service simple, yet complete.
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if kaboodle - leading the social shopping pack - raised 5 and sold for 30 - i would hate to guess what some of the less-developed me-too sites could get.
Posted by: mathew johnson | August 8, 2007 9:27 AM
Congratulations to the Kaboodle team. This is some great market validation for the social shopping space. As co-founder of Wishpot, a personal and social shopping utility, I firmly believe we have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity and innovation for social shopping.
Max Ciccotosto
Co-founder and CEO
www.wishpot.com
Posted by: Max Ciccotosto | August 8, 2007 9:47 AM
Since recently launching http://www.wish2list.com, it's nice to see the interest in social wish list sites.
Posted by: Jonathan | December 18, 2007 2:56 PM