GetVendors – a Single Place for All Your Household Needs

Web 2.0 is great when you think of your work and communications. You have your files backed up, you have your workday scheduled, your favorite photos and videos are stored and shared with friends, family and colleagues, you can reach your contacts from almost any place on the globe. But are your household needs maintained as efficiently as your business life? If you have thousands of phones of drycleaners and plumbers in dozens of notebooks and your fridge is all covered with to-do stickers (like mine is), then the answer is definitely no.

Now there is a place on the web which will help you turn this ‘no’ into ‘yes’ – this place is GetVendors. Here is the website that will help you in arranging all your household activities in a very neat and interactive manner, finding professionals to repair your computer or help with moving.

The main page contains three major features (and respective tabs):

1. Local Services

Here is where you can submit a requirement when you need some services. You can easily complete a form where you state what kind of services you need, your location and contact details – and you can sit and wait for vendors to bid after they receive notifications from the GetVendors matchmaking system. All you will need to do is simply choose the most appropriate service provider based on you requirements and community trusted referrals.

It’s great that everything is here: from construction and roofing to arranging a wedding. Quite a nice tool if you don’t have enough offline friends who do roofing of their houses every day.

One of the most important things about this feature is the service guarantee. Here everything is based on community referrals. If the quality of services provided by a certain vendor is poor, it is always possible to submit a claim to GetVendors and after speaking to the opposite party – the vendor, I mean – measures are taken to prevent further dissatisfaction of other users. And vice versa – if the quality is good, you are able to add this vendor to your ‘favorite service’ list, thus ensuring additional advantages to the professional.

2. Household Organizer

This recently released feature is intended to manage information related to your household services. Here you can create your to-do lists (bonus point for having ready to use templates for over 20 tasks ranging from picnic preparation to nanny selection). This may certainly help you to track your activities, especially when you need to arrange a wedding, buy a new house and repair your car in the nearest future – and all of that simultaneously.

Here it is also possible to edit your requests and add service providers to your Favorite Services. All this information can be shared with friends or you can host your trusted contacts through a website link.

3. Community Groups

This seems to be the most interesting of all three services. Users participate in the community group by seeking advice and referrals for household services, responding to others queries. Over time, they build a shared pool of knowledgebase that is accessible to outside community members too. (You can take a look at an example.) It is possible to either join an existing local community you think appropriate and benefit from its activities (and contribute of course) or start your own community to share topics of interest and day-to-day ideas of real life.

I daresay, it’s useful real-life social networking. Pity that it’s all focused on California now but I’m sure this will change over time. Anyway it’s California where Silicon Valley is. Here is where social networking began and here is where new services like GetVendors should be tested first.