Product Wiki Overview:

ProductWiki is a product information site and wiki where people share information about popular consumer products. All of the wiki information pages and site content is written and maintained by consumers, shoppers and normal folks just like you and me. ProductWiki has a grand vision to become the most comprehensive, accurate and popular collaborated product site powered using wiki software.

We want to have information on every product; from the most popular cultural icons to the independent and innovative designers that are selling their creations out of their garages. It’s an ambitious goal, and it’s going to take a lot of people working together. That’s why we’re a wiki and that’s where you come in. We’ve already reached 13,000 products in our first year, and, together, we can get to the goal of 100,000 and beyond!

Erik Kalviainen Answers 10 Questions About Product Wiki:

Roughly how many merchants are included within Product Wiki?

All of the merchants listed on ProductWiki are provided from a Shopping.com partner program that delivers real-time “where to buy” links for each product. The merchants you see on ProductWiki all exist on Shopping.com.

Roughly how many products are included within Product Wiki?

Well, as I’m typing this, we have exactly 14367 products listed in the wiki, but that will change soon. Of those products, there is a degree of quality; from what you would call a “stub” on Wikipedia to fully-flushed out product reports.

Roughly how many individuals currently work on the Product Wiki support and coding teams?

We’re a 3 person team, with each of us (Erik, Amanie, Omar) playing the role of engineer, writer, editor, moderator, tech support, marketing, and executive.

What other places across the Internet, if any, are merchants and products included?

Like I said, we use the Shopping.com partner program to deliver real-time, relevant merchant links. The choice of what products and in what order they get listed is done by the community in an organic fashion. Product ideas come from personal experience, blogs, TV, and viral sources like digg / YouTube / StumbleUpon / del.icio.us.

What, in your opinion, are the highlight features Product Wiki offers it’s users?

I think our strongest features are those that encourage collaboration amongst the community. Our collaborative review system is pretty popular and shows a lot of promise; users submit pros and cons about a product that then get voted up or down by other members. It’s really fun when people work together to review a product.

What, in your opinion are the highlight features Product Wiki offers merchants?

ProductWiki puts the consumer first, and so I would say we are less-aligned to the merchant than to the consumer, but merchants may find our collaborative approach to creating product reports useful in getting feedback about the products they sell.

Are new features being added and updated often? How often would you say?

We continue to evolve organically with updates to the sites happening continually. It’s common to see minor tweaks done daily or weekly, with major releases happening every month or two. Our most successful features didn’t even exist when we launched in 2005, so you could say we’re a work in progress. Lately, however, we think we’ve settled on our core feature set.

How does Product Wiki plan to stay competitive with sites like Amazon and eBay marketplaces?

Instead of competing with the established, huge marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, we see ourselves as co-existing with them by fulfilling the need for unbiased, accurate, and trustworthy product information. Decide what you want to buy on ProductWiki, then buy it from Amazon or eBay.

Where do you see Product Wiki in the next 3-5 years?

I see ProductWiki reaching a tipping point of community involvement pretty soon, and when that happens, there will most definitely be very strong growth for quite some time (2-3 years) as we move towards our goal of being the world’s largest, comprehensive database of product information. Things really get interesting then.

What Online product marketplaces, other than Product Wiki, do you personally use to shop from?

Living in Canada , the online shopping space is definitely less fervent than the USA . Ironically, I do most of my shopping in “real” life, now. When I lived in California a couple of years ago I couldn’t get enough of sites like Newegg, eBay, and Amazon. I really like some of the more innovative online marketplaces like woot! and threadless.com. I like how they tie in with their community.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

I really like the goals and vision of this company and it’s staff members. From what I can see they have entered the product information world with a bang and haven’t looked back since 2005 when they first launched. They have come a long way since then that’s for sure. I feel honored to be writing about a site of this caliber and for getting the opportunity to pick the brain of Erik for this interview.

To Erik: Thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions for our readers. Wiki’s are really getting to be popular and you guys are one of the first to launch one solely for products, so bravo! It will be interesting to see where you go from here and what happens in the future with your site. I like how easy it is to use Product Wiki and so far the product information I have seen has been right on! Keep up the good work and let the rest of your team know how valuable we all think your site content is.

To our readers: We hope you enjoyed this little QandA with Erik from Product Wiki. We plan on doing several more interviews with other product site founders and employees. If you haven’t already, be sure to grab our articles feed so you don’t miss any of our other interviews!

Product Wiki is Featured as one of the shopping wikis on our Product Listing Guide!