Consumers planning to buy a Wii Fit or Blackberry Storm this holiday season should act fast: Those are some of the gadgets that will disappear first this holiday season, according to the great Sold Out Guide on shopping blog Shefinds.com. Last month, I interviewed SheFinds.com founder Michelle Madhok about the Web 3.0 concept behind the site.
"Web 2.0 was all about everybody having access…Everybody had an opinion," she says. "What we’re looking for now in Web 3.0 is curation. And that’s where we come in."
Shefinds.com is the more popular property of the women-oriented online media company White Cat Media, which also owns MomFinds–and a number of "Finds" domain names for future verticals. Both sites aim to fix the online shopping model, according to Madhok. "If you Google something like black pants, you get 10 million results back. The shopping model is broken for people who want to shop online," she says.
SheFinds.com scouts the web for hot fashion and beauty products and links to them, garnering revenue from the stores when SheFinds visitors click through and make a purchase. Founded in 2004, the site now has 300,000 monthly unique visitors and syndicates its content to The Huffington Post, Real Simple, Comcast, MSN, and Yahoo.
Earlier this year, we published an interview with venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson about the success of women’s media company Glam.com, which skyrocketed past iVillage to become one of the top 15 most popular websites in the United States–proving that there’s room for newcomers to succeed in the women’s market online. We think Shefinds’ shopping model makes a lot of sense in this space, and we’ll be keeping an eye on this company’s progress.
It’s too bad online shopping is going to take a major hit this year; according to a report on CNET today, online sales growth projections have been cut in half for November-December.
Update: Here are some Black Friday deals from CNET.
12/01 update: Black Friday online shopping increased 10 percent over last year, according to numbers from Nielsen. Consumer electronics was the fastest growing category. Hopefully that level of growth holds throughout the holiday shopping season.
—Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
