Shopensteinr Lives!

When you look at a product on Amazon.com, there is a part of each product page that displays what people also buy when they purchase the product that you are viewing. I found this to be extremely interesting, and even more-so after I had some conversations with Amazon API pioneers Valdis Krebs and Bernardo Huberman.  So I co-created Shopensteinr, at Humana, with my main man Ramtin and we had Seth create the awesome design.

The tool taps into Amazon.com’s Application Programming Interface (API) to help you visualize product relationships.

Shopensteinr Use Case

Shopensteinr shows you what people buy in relation to a generic search term. It can be used as a consumer research tool around topics of interest, and has proven to be especially useful for us when trying to understand the types of health related products people care enough about to purchase, and how they’re related to each other. For example, here is a Shopensteinr search on the term diabetes:

The insights come from the connections between diabetes general information, nutrition and living with the chronic condition on the go. With almost every inner circle product connected to a recipe book of some kind…

How Shopensteinr Works

When you type a generic search term into Shopensteinr, like diabetes, Shopensteinr displays ten products related to that search term. You may search within a specific Amazon.com department, like books, or all departments, and each of the ten products returned can have up to five products directly associated with them. This makes up Shopensteinr’s inner and outer rings of up to 60 products.

Shopensteinr has two viewing areas, the product list on the left side of the screen, which is a ranked list of up to 60 products displayed, and the interactive sociogram on the right side of the screen. Green lines connect your search term to the ten products that Amazon returns from your search. Purple lines connect to products that are “also purchased.” Line thickness varies but does not have an attribute.

Each search on Shopensteinr produces a unique URL that can be bookmarked, as Amazon.com randomly returns ten products per search. Individual searches for the same search term will vary, so bookmark your favorite searches.

Shopensteinr Features

The following features have been included in this first iteration of Shopensteinr:

Hover – Hovering over a product picture on the right side of the screen will reveal a pop-up box that displays the product rank, which is derived from the specific department the product resides within, product picture, product price and product rating.

Click – Clicking on a product from either the right or left side of the screen centers that product within the sociogram on the right side of the screen.

Focus – Clicking the “Focus” button on the left side of the screen or double clicking on the product picture on the right side of the screen allows you to focus on the connections of that particular product.

Let me know what you think…