Best Decision: Not Another Social Shopping Service!

Best Decision is a shopping recommendation service to help consumers find products based on more than just price and price and price. Its algorithms take into account distance to store, brand power, product reviews, and the advice and wisdom of the social network. The shopping recommendation genre is not an uncrowded space, to say the least.

Best Decision comes from Leap Commerce, a San Francisco-based startup that has attracted some attention from the tech press. No wonder, it has a good storyline: two Facebook emigrees and a few other tech heavyweights found their own company to improve the on-line shopping experience. Their idea is to fine tune the search for stuff on the web by analyzing their subscribers purchasing decisions and the shopping knowledge of their Facebook pals, along with crunching on 26 other parameters used in a secret algorithmic sauce.

Do their algorithms deliver the goods, and thereby confirm we’ve entered the Age of Nate Silver?

If you’re Nate Silver, you can work magic with Big Data; for everyone else, it’s not so clear cut. After going on a window shopping adventure with Best Decision, I found the experience to be more lke being prodded through a cattle chute that terminated at all-the-usual big box stores.

So after loading the Best Decision app onto my iPad, I went about selecting my “channels”, which are default shopping sites such as Wall Mart and an online retailer probably no one’s ever heard about, called Amazon.

I have been an Amazon customer of long standing–maybe by chance you are too–and they know my buying preferences based on many year’s worth of purchases. Best Decision takes on a Russian Matryoshka doll quality with their service wrapped around Amazons’s, leaving me confused as to who was actually recommending products.

In any case, you’ll also need to set your personal parameters to tell the Best Decision oracle the importance of price, distance to the store, brand popularity (overall Facebook likes), and social graph influences (Facebook friends’ likes) in your purchasing process.

In my search for jewelry, knives, hammers, and other things, I was invariably led to a national chain of one kind or another– Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, CVS Pharmacy, William Sonoma. Best Decision will locate a nearby physical store when possible, provide links to online sites, and note a low price for a product.

Startups such as Taap.it or NJ’s Promoverse, two other social shopping sites I’ve written about in this space, focus on Main-street sellers. Perhaps they’ve done a better job for their home town of San Francisco, but for now Best Decision is really an aggregator for large rectangular purveyors.

One differentiating feature that I should mention is their universal cart. This lets you buy from e-tailers and (eventually) nearby stores through their single purchase point. Best Decision then handles the back-end settlement of the transaction.

Best Decision is for now IOS-based only; an Android version is in the works.

There is a platform underneath the app, and Best Decision has an SDK for developers who want to include the buying recommendation engine in their own software.