Bohemia Bunny

Singapore Shopping Meta-Blog

July 26th, 2007 by lynnylchan under Paid Post

*Paid Post*

Blogs that function as online storefronts for retailers are nothing new in Singapore. In fact the online shopping community is pretty large, with a huge variety of items being offered. However, keeping track of so many blogs can be daunting. This is where BlogShopr comes in.

BlogShopr is a meta-blog that collates posts from its member blogs, which are blogs selling apparel, accessories, jewelry and cosmetics, among others. Each time a new item is posted, it will appear on BlogShopr. How, then, is it any different from using RSS feeds to track the shopping blogs?

Well, for starters, BlogShopr has a staggering number of shops. Just scrolling down the list will take you some time. The reason for this huge membership is that the items for sale aren’t limited to just women’s clothing, although they form a majority of the blogs. Accessories such as bags and shoes, men’s clothing, children’s clothing and even pet accessories are on offer. Some blogs also have sprees, where buyers pool their orders from overseas so as to save on shipping costs.

The main advantage of BlogShopr is its bandwidth-friendly collapsed posts system. Each post from a retailer contains a description of the item, with pictures hidden after the jump, so the main page won’t take forever to load. If a description interests you, you just expand the post to see the pictures, and a direct link takes you to the seller’s blog.

Since BlogShopr collects shopping blogs in one place, comparison shopping becomes easier. Most of the blogs selling women’s apparel, for instance, will be stocking the latest trends, and it’s possible to find identical pieces being sold by different shops, so the buyer has more choice.

On the other hand, BlogShopr could still improve on several aspects. Since shopowners can tag their posts as belonging to several categories, it would be good if I could sort blogposts by these categories. For example, if I only felt like looking for children’s clothing, a ’sort’ feature could save me time and effort by eliminating unrelated posts. If such a feature is already in place, it needs to be made more prominent because I couldn’t find it.

Also, the ability to do comparison shopping is rather limited - readers will have to compare manually, since this isn’t a full-fledged shopping site like Amazon.com and a true cross-comparison feature is lacking. However, the primary function of BlogShopr is to aggregate shopping blogs, and in that it serves its purpose well.

As part of its promotional efforts, BlogShopr is offering a $30 voucher from http://cheap-treats.blogspot.com to be won in a lucky draw, which will be held in August. To enter the lucky draw, all you have to do is blog about why you would like the prize, include a link and leave a comment on the lucky draw post. More details will be available come August!