Browse here: Buy there. The new mantra from Lasoo.

By Simon van Wyk

HotHouse has recently helped Salmat, Australasia’s leading direct customer communications company, develop and launch an exciting new way to shop.

Tapping into the trend that Australians are increasingly turning to price comparison sites before purchasing offline, Lasoo, an innovative pre-shop search engine has been launched just ahead of the frantic Christmas shopping period.

Lasoo scans through a stack of catalogues and direct mail flyers to find all the best bargains, displaying all the current specials from participating catalogues around Australia.

The site features comparisons of automotive accessories, home ware and furniture, beauty products, electronic goods, appliances and toys and games. Items can be searched also by shopping centre or post code to find the cheapest deal near the user’s home.

With six or seven thousand offers on the site at any given time, within a matter of seconds consumers can find the best deals without having to spend time on and off line hunting around for them.

Lasoo CEO Paul Marshall said that for consumers, Lasoo offers the ultimate in convenience shopping.

The site has been built using J2EE technologies from Endeca and FatWire in a load balanced web farm in a managed hosting environment. The platform scales horizontally at each tier across redundant infrastructure, and these services can be extended independently as the product is further developed.

Lasoo’s platform also supports ‘white box’ editions of the core catalogue and guided search facilities which are hosted in the shared infrastructure. These ‘editions’ can be readily skinned with CSS transforms without the need for bespoke development.

The site features Endeca guided search technology providing pre-categorised search results, allowing consumers to prioritise their choices in their own personalised way, helping consumers to ask smarter questions by exposing all the choices available to them.

As of early December, two weeks after its launch, the site had recorded over 2.5 million page views and over 1 million searches had been conducted.

Check out the Lasoo site.