Fruugo welcomes you to the jungle: Hands-on review
Last night I joined a small group of Finnish bloggers and startups at Fruugo HQ in Helsinki for the first demo session of the service. We were also the first to get invitations to the public beta. Here are my initial thoughts.
What is Fruugo?
Fruugo is a Finnish startup unlike any other. They have started big gotten along investors such as Nokia’s Chairman Jorma Ollila and they aim at revolutionizing e-commerce. They sure have the resources for it. They are located in right of the center of Helsinki, where they employ close to 100 people.
Fruugo is what you get when you combine social shopping, a product finder, price comparison and a slick e-commerce site. They want to combine Europe’s (EU) webshops into kind of a huge mall, where it’s fun to shop or just hang around.
Welcome to the Jungle is just a release name
The first beta release is called welcome to the jungle. They will have new releases in a fast pace, maybe even weekly and they will be named after (bad) songs.
The UI is colorful, but still simple. The service is really easy to use, although at this stage there are quite a lot of errors. Apparently they have a lot of features coming up in the future releases.
A lot of work done and a lot of work still to be done
The biggest task that Fuugo has done is prepare themselves for integration with a huge number of e-commerce platforms. Also they have done their work in trying to combine webshops from around Europe in a way that it doesn’t really matter to the user from which country their goods will be delivered from. Having lots of different size webshops from different countries working on the same platform is by no means a small effort.
At this stage they have webshops mainly from Finland and Sweden, but they are opening up more countries in the near future. From the small selection of products they have on the site it’s hard to tell what will be the biggest benefits of Fruugo will be. But I can see that they are on to something big here.
More screenshots from Fruugo on Flickr.
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Date: January 30, 2009 | Time: 11:52 am
[...] not going to give you a tour around the user experience of Fruugo, that is being covered already by Startupbin, who attended the same group with me. Also, for screenshots of the service in Fruugo photostream in [...]
Date: January 30, 2009 | Time: 3:37 pm
Nice little tour. Heard too that they’re on to something, and it definitely gives SMEs a great way to sell their goods via the internet. Curious where they’re going next. What where the product groups/ shops you could shop for in the beta? I heard something about baby/ parenting goods as well as outdoor equipment, is that right?
Date: January 30, 2009 | Time: 3:45 pm
As far as I know they are starting beta testing with two target groups: pregnant women and early adopters. So the product categories are geared towards them at the moment.
I believe outdoor equipment will follow soon.
Date: January 31, 2009 | Time: 2:17 pm
I was their perfect target group a few months ago: pregnant early adopter with an interest in outdoor equipment. I should get a beta invite just for existing!
Date: February 1, 2009 | Time: 7:42 pm
[...] 1, 2009 · No Comments More about Fruugo launch here, here and here. Last Wednesday I was invited to Fruugo to see their service and hear their plans for the future. I [...]
Date: February 4, 2009 | Time: 2:35 pm
I’m really curious about Fruugo. A lot of hype but we’ll see if they manage to deliver. Hope they’ll make shopping as easy and fun as e.g. etsy!
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