CoolProducts.com’s Gift Professor provides gift suggestions based on a short survey about the gift recipient. Screenshot from coolproducts.com.
If you think CoolProducts.com sounds similar to other ecommerce sites you’ve seen, Tony Schmidt suggests you to think again. Schmidt, the CEO of Lawrence, Kan.-based CoolProducts, is very clear about what he believes distinguishes his website from the competition.
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“We do not analyze your click stream to provide ‘people like you bought this’ suggestions. That’s creepy,” Schmidt said in an email interview. “We do not provide stereotypical baskets of ideas based on personas like: Weekend Warrior or (Fashionista). That is not respectful. We do not crawl people’s Facebook accounts to see what they are interested in. Our service gives you the steering wheel to create a unique set of product ideas that are tailor made exactly to your recipients attributes.”
CoolProducts does that using a gift-finding tool called The Gift Professor (left, screenshot from coolproducts.com). The Gift Professor requires users to complete a survey about themselves and their gift recipients, taking into consideration factors like the recipients’ age, interests, occupation and personality traits. It uses that survey to generate gift ideas out of a pool of more than 45,000 products from some 2,000 mail order catalogs and merchants.
Within seconds of submitting the survey, users are given sortable lists of categorized results. Users can click specific products for more details and, if the gift’s right, purchase them through third-party vendors. CoolProducts, which relies on affiliate marketing as its lone revenue stream at this point, gets a cut of the sale from a vendor when a user makes a purchase.
Each of the site’s 45,000-plus gifts has special attributes assigned by CoolProducts’ team of “product finders.” It’s a matching process Schmidt likens to the gift-finding version of an online dating service.
“I … enlisted a group of (University of Kansas) social psychology doctoral candidates and a group of computer scientists to help me develop a matching technology like eHarmony,” Schmidt (left, photo courtesy of Schmidt) said. “The only difference is we are person-to-product instead of person-to-person.”
CoolProducts has been housed in the Lawrence Regional Technology Center, a technology incubator, since 2006. Schmidt funds the project with money he made in the 2006 sale of Heart of America Photography, another company he founded. “This,” Schmidt said, “is bootstrapping deluxe.”
Because of that, CoolProducts is working to attract users on a shoestring budget, relying mainly on social media, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and some PR. Through Sunday, the site had drawn nearly 15,000 visitors in November. Schmidt said CoolProducts needs to scale to 300,000 unique monthly visitors to become truly viable.
Of course, between the events of the last few days — Black Friday and Cyber Monday ring a bell? — there’s no better time than the present to remind Schmidt and company of the ample opportunity that exists if CoolProducts can attract those users.
“There are many additional monetization scenarios for us,” Schmidt says, “but user experience and building traffic have been our primary initial focus.”
For more on CoolProducts, check out its promotional video below featuring Schmidt (video from CoolProducts on YouTube).
