Our Story

The Idea

Online shopping is still pretty difficult – not adding products to your shopping cart or checking out, but sorting through the endless array of seemingly identical products to figure out which ones will best suit your unique lifestyle needs and interests. Sure it’s easy to buy books, music and consumer electronics because of all the sites that serve those categories. But think of how difficult it is to choose a backpack for a long hike in Yosemite, a quiet dishwasher for a small house, or even a hair dye that will actually stay vibrant after multiple washes. For many of these types of products, most people don’t even think of researching online; they go straight to their local department or specialty store and ask a sales associate for a recommendation. That’s great news for those stores, but why is it so difficult online? Why can’t shoppers learn about products right on their favorite web stores? In 2006, the reality was customers had only a few, limited research options: Amazon.com, CNET, Epinions and various search engines…all of which have major gaps or shortcomings.

Well, we think that there should be a better way to research products online. We believe that:

• Customers should not have to leave a retailer's site to read reviews on Amazon
• Customers shouldn’t have to trudge through countless search results to find that rare nugget of useful information, instrumental to the decision making process
• Customers shouldn’t have to get in their car and drive to a brick-and-mortar store to get an unbiased product recommendation

Getting the Band Back Together

What’s true for startups is generally true for most successful companies: The team is often more important than the idea. Many people have great ideas, but it’s a solid team that actually makes it happen.

Andy Chen and Robert Chea started Fogdog.com in 1995, a few years out of Stanford and a few years before the internet boom. The Internet was just getting noticed then (Netscape, Yahoo, Google and Mosaic weren’t yet household names) and ecommerce didn’t exist yet. Bandwidth was slow, there was no security and customers had not yet embraced technology in making buying decisions. So, instead of diving straight into ecommerce, they built numerous marketing and interactive sites for top sporting goods brands such as Easton, Trek, NordicTrack, Mizuno, Oakley, etc. Over time, these sites became more and more complex featuring rich features and functionality, and the Internet had finally caught up with their ecommerce vision.

In 1999, Fogdog.com went public as the world’s largest online sporting goods store. This was an enormous accomplishment since the team was a collection of young folks with a vision and a slew of large consulting firms saying the technology they were building wasn’t possible. But they did it. In 2001, GSI Commerce, the leading outsourced ecommerce provider acquired Fogdog.com and by 2002, most of the team spread to other jobs.

Over the next few years, many former-Fogdoggers kept asking when Andy and Robert were starting something new and whether they could be a part of it. It took a few years to find the right idea. But once it was found, many of those former-Fogdoggers hung up their suits and ties to pursue this next adventure. We have also added to the team many more talented individuals who share our vision and are constantly looking for more, so check out our jobs section to see what’s available.

Making it Happen

Of course, a goal without a plan is just a wish. So, we sat in front of a whiteboard with our two founding engineers, Jim Morris and Gautam Prabhu, to turn this big idea into a reality. We had a single goal: Allow retailers to install Amazon.com-like review functionality onto their sites in 24 hours with minimal engineering. Of course, Robert, the tinkerer, added another requirement – that the review functionality be BETTER than anything else out there. Ok. Add that to the list. .

And just like at Fogdog, we had breakthrough after breakthrough to figure out how to make it all work. We designed an AJAX engine to give our clients and consumers more control, we invented PowerTags™ to make the reviews more structured and useful, and we came up with Asymmetrical ASP to eliminate the risk of downtime and to lower the cost of delivering our services. Then, the engineers told us to go away for a while. Two months later, they showed us what they built…and it was EXACTLY what we had envisioned.

Next, we found some early customers to try it out and quickly discovered that the product reviews had potential to change the way people fundamentally shop online. We call this concept “Social Shopping”, which is embodied at Buzzillions.com. And now, we are helping our vast network of merchant partners harness the power of Social Shopping through our fully managed customer review solutions in the same way.