Hearst's Social Shopping Site Kaboodle Gets A Realtime Makeover

Social shopping site Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Interactive Group in 2007 for $30 million or so, is re-launching its site to upgrade its product-discovery engine that allows online shoppers to discover, search for, browse, and interact with the more than six million products.

Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service and search product that allows you to discover and share e-commerce content. With the re-launch and re-design of the site, Kaboodle is becoming less content centric and more realtime and product and people centric.

The new version of the product-discovery engine allows online shoppers to search and discover products according to normal search terms, but also according to popularity amongst other shoppers in the Kaboodle community and consumers. The platform has upgraded search to be realtime and lets users see products that are most popular right now based on specific filters, such as items from a specific store, within a specific category, related items, and more. For example, a user can see what are the most popular items being searched on Nordstrom.com.

Kaboodle’s bookmarklet functionality which allows users to add products from anywhere on the Web is staying the same, but the site has made it easier for retailers to incorporate the bookmarklet on their own sites. Manish Chandra, co-founder of Kaboodle, says that the site will continue to make realtime improvements in the coming year, hoping to become the go-to destination for product discovery and sharing. Chandra says the site has over 1 million registered users and is seeing 8 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore. Launched in 2005, Kaboodle faces competition from ThisNext, Like.com and Sugar’s ShopStyle.