I’ve been waiting for something like this for some time now, an amazon.com type store to go live in New Zealand and at last the wait is over
[:D]
Ferrit, a telecom owned online mall, is a replacement the god awful NZ MSN shopping channel that I’ve hated for years. It’s great to see they managed to get it out just in time for Christmas for those of us who can’t stand the hunting for car parks and wading though swarms of crazy shoppers. Anyway here’s my mini review after the first few days of use.
First the good things about telecoms new online store Ferrit.co.nz:
- There are over 1.2 million products available online!
- It has a wish list type feature so you can share with your friends and family via email
- The “my interests” feature lets you create a customer filter of categories you are interested in
- Prices seem quite sharp from what I’ve seen
- There are heaps of great competitions
- Great way for people overseas to buy gifts for their kiwi families
And now the bad:
- On the tech side of things the site doesn’t embrace technologies that it really should. For example there isn’t any RSS support, I can’t see anyway to link to my wish list, an ajax interface would have been nice but that really is asking to much I guess.
- The site doesn’t seem to have its own products like Amazon; it’s more of a portal to other retailers, which is good and bad really.
- A lack of content, no product reviews by ferrit staff etc etc
So as a whole the site is a good start, lots of products and some good features. While the site is off to a good start I’m sure there must be new features on the way. From what I can see this is very much a version 1.0 of the design. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on site changes if/when they happen; hopefully I’ll be able to post my wish list on here once they get around to making it possible.