Had a little play with Google’s new boutiques.com.
It’s kind of fun to play with.
There’s a bit of setting up in the beginning, as it tries to work out your style, using a good old Google algorithm. It shows about 20 pairs of fashion photos for you to choose between, and then classifies you as either Romantic, Classic, Boho, Street, Casual Chic. But you can add one in later – I didn’t want to be restricted to Romantic, when I really prefer casual elegant.
Then luckily you can do likes and hates. I hate strapless dresses, mostly because you need to be well-endowed to make them look good. And high or clunky heels suck, flares and a-line dresses aren’t flattering, and I have my other preferences.
Not that the filtering works perfectly yet. After selecting my preferences, and searching for a little black dress, it still brought up way too many strapless a-line dresses.
But it was excellent to go looking through a large number of dresses all on one page. The images loaded quickly, and gave price info on page.
It works like pay-per-click. You click on an image and get redirected to the shop selling the dress.
The footer for the site says “Boutiques.com charges merchants to include products on this website in most cases. ” and provides a link to make an application for your online shop to be reviewed.
But all the shops I looked at were in the US, so at this point, even with a strong Aussie dollar, it’s unlikely I would use it.
