Q. Who is Burning a Hole for?
A. For people who don't know what they want when they are looking for a present or something for themselves.
Q. What is Burning a Hole?
A. It is a price-based shopping site with thousands and thousands of products. Burning a Hole only partner with hundreds of great stores like Amazon, John Lewis, Virgin Wines and displays their products in a totally new and useful way.
Q. Why has no one else thought of this?
A. I don't know. When I had the idea, for weeks I thought "someone else must have thought of this, surely?" But no, they hadn't. There are gift sites out there that let you filter items by price but they normally only have a small number of products.
Q. What is wrong with most web sites, from Amazon to Google?
A. They all assume you know what you want. You have to enter some text in a search box or decide on a category, like Books or Gardening or Flowers. Many of us don't have a clue what we want but we know it when we see it.
Q. What is wrong with most web sites, from Amazon to Google?
A. If you want a book on say, Theology and know nothing about the area, how many books on theology will have theology in the title? If you are lucky you may find a vertical Theology Book site, but you may find 20 or 30 sites like that too. People tend to research and hunt down what they are looking for until they get bored.
Q. What is wrong with most search engines?
A. They expect you to tell them what you want before you know what they have. That would be like someone with a huge bag of sweets asking you what flavour you'd like, they may be all walnut whirls (ugh!) or he may have 42 different types of dark chocolates.
Q. I know what I want, is Burning a Hole for me?
A. According to the highly respected usability company, UIE, almost half of all purchases made on the web are made "on impulse". You may have started with a set plan and a budget, but more often than not you will end up buying something completely different despite yourself. So, if you have never struggled to think of what to buy someone, Burning a Hole may not be for you... you lucky thing!
Q. Why do sites always group almost identical things together?
A. Sure it can be nice to get a "People who like this also bought this list"... but how often is that genuinely useful or does it show you stuff you already own anyway?
Q. What are the Burning a Hole filters?
A. When looking for a present for your Mum on Amazon, you may click "Gardening" because she likes gardening but that is a very limiting choice. My Mum also likes many other things. I would much rather be able to select "Not computers, not video games, not electronics, not Men's fashion". Although at times you may think you know what you want... you probably have a better idea of what you don't want.
Q. Is Burning a Hole a price comparison site like Kelkoo or Price Runner?
A. No, it's the opposite really. Kelkoo are Price Runner are great if you know what you want to buy and want to find the best online deal. Burningahole is for when you are looking for inspiration.
Q. Where did the idea come from?
A. I am rubbish at buying presents mainly because I don't know what is "out there".. what the options are. The idea came from a personal need to be able to search the internet not by keyword but by price.
A. I have been involved in creating many shopping sites and interestingly I used to notice in the log files that some people ask Google to solve their problems. There'd be searches like "Where can I find a great present for my dad?" or "What is the best place to buy a new cooker?" or even "What is the meaning of life?". I knew that some questions I couldn't answer but it became clear that there were enough people expecting to get answers to some questions entered into search engines to make it worth building a site just for them.
Q. Why did you choose the prices you did?
A. Because there is a human difference between one pound and two pound that there isn't between say, £54 and £55. When you plan to spend £300 there isn't that much difference between £295 and £320... a range of fifteen pounds... but if you were spending £10, being charged £25 or being given £5 back would be a noticeable thing.