We just added mattresses to Yipit. Now you can search every showroom for mattresses in new york, refine by price, brands and materials, and find the nearest showrooms with the widest selections.
Read all about our results in Furnication, our furniture blog.
On Wednesday we announced our business profile pages and elicited feedback on Yipit. Well, we got it in the form of an awesome UI & SEO review from techsoapbox. Depending on your math, there were just shy of 30 discrete suggestions.
So as we cranked away on our follow-on release, we incorprated a lot of the feedback, including:
One of the most frequent suggestions we receive on Yipit is a need for business profile pages (techsoapbox even mentioned it last week). After putting a lot of thought into implementation, we’ve rolled out profile pages for every furniture store in new york. For example:
We have some exciting news: A few moments ago, we released Yipit!
Here are the highlights:
We’re 100% focused on adding more and more product and service categories, as well as new ways to interact with that data. In fact, we will never stop adding categories and features. We have a list of literally hundreds of possible features, but we wanted to let everyone start using Yipit as soon as possible. That way we can incorporate your experiences and feedback and become more and more useful. You can track our progress through the Yipit Blog or by following our twitter account.
Thanks again to everyone who gave us early feedback on Yipit. Please continue to let us know what you would like to see (from features to categories). We’re very excited about Yipit and hope we will be able to help you find the right stores selling the products you want.
Update: Just added mattresses in New York. Now you can search every showroom for the type, brand and pricing you want.
When we tackle a new category, we don’t just grab a shirttail or push it out of bounds. We Terry Tate Office Linebacker it.
Here’s an update on what we have been doing with our first major category: home furniture.
Step 1. Learn how to shop for furniture
To ascertain the key questions and decision factors facing NYC furniture shoppers, we looked at the following:
Industry Experts. We consumed every NYC design and shopping journal we could get our hands on, including: Apartment Therapy New York, New York Magazine, Daily Candy New York, Daily Dose, Design*Sponge, Dwell Blog, NYT Home & Garden, and many more.
Taxonomy. To formulate a universe of products, we scoured major furniture websites, like Ikea, Rooms To Go and Furniture.com, as well as the websites of local showrooms. We learned how stores organize their inventory and (hopefully) how shoppers expect that inventory to be organized.
Interviews. We solicited as much feedback as possible from store owners, interior designers, and friends.
Step 2. Find every furniture store
Next we compiled a list of every business that could possibly sell furniture. We:
Eventually, we narrowed our list down to approximately 2,000 furniture stores.
Step 3. Understand every store
Finally we needed to learn as much as possible about every store. Here’s how we did it:
Went Door to Door. Seriously. Some had closed, some didn’t sell furniture, and some were awesome. For every furniture store, we documented what each store sold and what made them special. We collected over 400 points of data at each location. We also spoke to as many people as we could – the owners, the clerks and the customers.
Went Webpage to Webpage. We also reviewed the stores’ websites, news media / blog references and online profiles on sites like Yelp, Citysearch and New York Magazine. We’ve organized all this research and will display it on each store’s Yipit profile.
Step 4: To be decided
We want to be ridiculously thorough. That’s why we’re releasing Yipit as early as possible, so we can gather feedback on how to maximize the information on each business and continue to improve our results.
Coming up with the methodology above was a challenge for us: lots of research, mistakes and hard work. But, now that we have the experience under out belt, we will be able to aggressively expand into other categories. We also recognize that it’s not in any way perfect. So, if you have any ideas at all on how we can improve it / sources to check, please email us or leave a comment.
Update: Check out Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.
Each product you shop for raises a different set of questions, and we want to be able to answer them for every category. That’s why we’re building New York local search one category at a time.
The first one is Home Furniture. Here’s how we picked it:
Challenge. We wanted to start with a really difficult category, one wrought with opaque, disorganized, mostly offline information. Turns out there are a lot of them, though furniture is definitely a good example. Search “Furniture” on Google or Yahoo, and you’ll receive mediocre results. Search for the actual type of furniture you’re interested in, and you will be very disappointed.
Granularity. We aim to go way deeper than any other local search site, and satisfy diverse preferences of style, price and materials. In other words, if you’re looking for a mailbox all you need to know is location, but deciding which furniture store to visit requires more granularity. For example, you might want to know who carries low-priced modern leather sofas.
Volume. Which vertical has the most searches? Analyzing search volume via Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and Overture (RIP) provided a list of highly searched categories in New York, such as restaurants, salons, florists, hardware and furniture stores.
Number of Stores. We wanted to release our product right away, so we can start collecting feedback as soon as possible. There are a relatively limited number of furniture stores (currently we track around 350 consumer facing showrooms specializing in Home Furniture and Lighting).
Adjacencies. We’re planning on quickly expanding to other categories. If we start to nail Home Furniture, we’ll widen our net to Office Furniture, Appliances and Electronics.
So that’s how we chose our initial category. Since then, we’ve gone crazy trying to deliver the perfect local search results for Manhattan furniture. Hopefully our results will demonstrate the power of “deep local search.”
Update. So how did we do? Decide for yourself: here are Yipit’s results for Furniture New York and Couches New York.
We would like to introduce you to what has been keeping us busy for the better part of the last two years: Yipit.
To do so, let us take you to a time before the internet and tell you about something people used to do that should seem laughable now.
Since the early 1900’s, once a year, local phone companies would take the name, address and phone number of every business in their town and organize them by categories like lawyers, restaurants and furniture stores. They would then print this list in a big book and distribute these heavy directories to every home in the city.
It seems pretty silly but it was the only way that people in town could find the businesses they were looking for. In fact, people used these books all the time. By 2000, people were using the yellow pages 14.9 billion times a year. But then, the internet came along.
If there was any business that the internet should make better, it was these printed directories. Internet-based local directories would have numerous significant advantages over their printed predecessors. To name a few of these advantages:
With all of these advantages, hundreds of websites launched poised to make the printed yellow pages obsolete including CitySearch, Google Local, Yelp and, even the print directories came out with their own version, Yellow Pages Online. It looked like the printed yellow pages were done.
But, that’s where our story takes a curious turn. Despite years of local search innovation, accelerated internet usage, massive broadband adoption, people are still using the printed yellow pages - 13.4 billion times a year in 2007. How could that be? Why haven’t internet directories and their seemingly superior product taken over?
Well, it turns out that despite all of the clear advantages of being on the internet, consumers find internet local directories unsatisfying. We spent a lot of time trying to understand what went wrong and there are many reasons; but, the following are the most glaring:
What was most interesting about these two pitfalls was that these problems, while not easy, didn’t seem insurmountable. The key to the problem is that you need to focus on a single geographic market. You could collect the information from the local businesses and use that data to provide accurate and complete results to local search queries for that market.
So, that’s what Yipit has been working on. We are going to provide accurate and complete local search results for Manhattan and we are going to do it one category at a time. The first category we have been breaking down is home furniture which we will launch later this summer.
We are very excited about the data we are collecting and the product we are building. It’s the culmination of two years of research, hard work and many lessons learned. Everyone believes that online local directories are the future of local search. Yipit is going to help people believe it’s the present.
