User:Niazza/Pikaba.com

Pikaba

Type	Private
Founded	2006
Headquarters	Bellevue, WA, USA
Key people	Irena Balin, Co-Owner, Dmitry Balin, Co-Owner
Website	Pikaba.com TEST THIS!

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Pikaba.com

Pikaba.com is a social shopping network representing community-driven online marketplace where members and their friends build long-term relationships with merchants. Pikaba is simple: buyers post requests for products or services, get referrals from social network, review offers from Pikaba’s sellers who have placed a bid for this particular product/service. The main difference of Pikaba from every other social shopping network is its new concept for matching quotes and requests. Pikaba uses new matching engine to find the best match whenever it was posted. The match will be analyzed mathematically on how much it suits to the request. And the end-user will have the best match within his/her location (with the percentage of matching listed behind each search result).

History

Pikaba.com was launched on 2006. Pikaba offers comprehensive set of social shopping networking tools available for free in one place.

Pikaba’s owners Irena and Dmitry Balin launched this new social shopping media with an emphasis on completely new concept: bringing off-line merchants to on-line customers through reverse auction where one can find the best match to the request posted.

Now Pikaba is social shopping network where users find products and services they are looking for. There are about 30,000 products and services listed with Pikaba and about 12,000 requests posted. At Pikaba user can address the request to the seller in a wide range of categories including but not limited with the following list: consumer electronics, auto-, moto vehicles, tickets, travel, clothing, shoes and accessories. This is a new on-line shopping place allowing offline sellers to enter new on-line market share.

Business model

Pikaba positions itself as a social shopping network covering a wide range of categories. Currently Pikaba has 15,000 users and is growing fast.

User posts the request and advanced search done through matching engine allowing fast finding of the best seller (as the best match) for customer's requests. Pikaba uses geolocation API allowing to narrow search by location through finding the best match for sellers and service providers locally. Within the social shopping network sellers are immediately notified concerning customer's request.

At the moment Pikaba.com is completely free of charge.

Users can now post requests for particular item online in real-time, share advices and opinions just like they do at their favorite stores, Pikaba combines social networking, and community-based item sharing and now it’s planning to launch online shopping.

Once the name of the product /service was posted, Pikaba provides you with the list of categories, most related tags, and shows you the percentage of how much each tag is correlated to the product posted (defined by name).

Pikaba has launched a number of additional features. For example, there are several users group, and the users can start pools, blogs and forums, can ask a piece of advice from Advisors group, this group includes experts in different areas, community leaders.

There is also a profound rating system for sellers and users based on the current activity and ratings gathered from other users. Features announced as coming soon: Coupons, GroupBy, e-commerce through shopping card.

Industry recognition and awards

Pikaba.com won an Open Web Award for 2008 at Mashable.com (http://mashable.com/2008/12/16/open-web-awards-2-winners/)

References

1) http://www.pikaba.com

2) http://mashable.com/2008/12/16/open-web-awards-2-winners/

List of Social Networking websites:

• ThisNext.com: Users can browse recommended products, add them to their wish lists, recommend or find out where to buy them, and create themed lists of their own.
• Crowdstorm.com: This site measures the buzz around products based on user recommendations. Popular items go to the top of the list.
• Kaboodle.com: Users create wish lists with photos and links to products for sale online. It’s easy to post a summary of anything found on the internet.
• Stylehive.com: This is the hot site for women’s fashions and interests.
• Wists.com: Users tend to focus on interesting new products and share links to the ones they want to buy.