Kaboodle Launches the Next Evolution of Online Shopping With A Multi-Faceted Product Discovery Experience

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Kaboodle (www.kaboodle.com), part of Hearst Magazines Digital Media and the largest and fastest-growing social Web site for passionate shoppers, today announced the re-launch of its site, including an expanded and unprecedented product-discovery engine that allows online shoppers to discover, search for, browse, and interact with the more than six million products added to Kaboodle by more than one million avid shoppers.

At the heart of Kaboodle's new site and shopping experience is its next-generation product-discovery engine, which addresses the key challenge of "findability" of lifestyle goods on the Web. The product-discovery engine allows online shoppers to search and discover products along three key dimensions or sources: people, other similar products, and popularity.

Because Kaboodle's community members share finds with one another, Kaboodle has always excelled at facilitating unexpected and exciting product discovery through people. Now Kaboodle has enhanced and evolved the end-user's experience by offering access to real-time product search, which provides the ability to see products that are most popular right now based on user-set parameters, such as items from a specific store, within a specific category, related items, and more. Users can now see a timeline around product discovery on Kaboodle, creating relevance, context, and value by knowing that something is popular based on a particular time frame. This marks the beginning of an ongoing initiative to create and enhance Kaboodle's real-time product search/browse and will lead to the rollout of major upgrades throughout 2010.

Kaboodle's ability to showcase items through an unprecedented variety of filters is due to its ground-breaking patented and patent-pending technology in three core areas – extraction, clustering, and classification. These proprietary technologies allow for creation and dynamic manipulation of the site's robust and socially-generated product catalog.

As an extraction tool, the ever-popular "Add to Kaboodle" button allows users to easily add products from anywhere on the Web with one click. With the re-launch, Kaboodle debuts its new "Add to Kaboodle" button, which enhances the user experience and makes it easy for retailers to embed the button directly on their sites. The button is available as an extension on many Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. It is also available as a "bookmarklet" that can be used on any browser, including Safari and Opera.

Kaboodle's clustering technology allows the site to automatically group and identify the same product uploaded from different sources as a single item, while the site's classifier methodically determines which category it fits best. Collectively, these technologies enable end-users a cleaner and more relevant shopping experience through filtered searches, structured browsing, and the discovery of millions of products added by users. 

Kaboodle's site redesign showcases the product-discovery technology developments and creates an even better shopping, browsing, and product-discovery experience for the end user. Visitors to the site will now find an interest-based channel structure, a fresh homepage surfacing popular products, and editorial curation of community finds.

"At Kaboodle, our goal has always been to make it simple and easy for shoppers to find, organize, and share the products they love. Our enhanced product discovery engine provides an even richer, more relevant and more personalized shopping experience for our users, making it easy for shoppers to find the great products added by our fast growing community in a very simple way," said Manish Chandra, CEO and co-founder of Kaboodle. "Today's launch marks another key milestone for us, and in 2010, Kaboodle continues its mission to lead the online shopping space through both business and technological innovation."

The Kaboodle community continues to increase at an impressive rate, growing its unique audience by 4,000% since December 2006 and growing revenue more than 70% from 2008 to 2009, despite 2009's challenging economy.

About Kaboodle

Kaboodle (www.kaboodle.com), a Hearst-owned and operated property, is the Internet's largest and fastest-growing social website for passionate shoppers. Kaboodle's shopping tools allow users to add products from anywhere online to their Kaboodle lists. As a result, it is home to the world's most exclusive catalog of user-curated products, making it the trusted source for discovering, sharing, and buying products from retailers large and small. With more than 16 million unique monthly visitors and a devoted community perpetually adding more finds, Kaboodle provides the ultimate platform for connecting people with products. Kaboodle was acquired by Hearst Corporation (www.hearst.com) in August 2007 and is part of the Hearst Magazines Digital Media site network.  

SOURCE Kaboodle