Quidsi takes you toy shopping at Yoyo.com

The growing e-commerce titan adds toys to its list of family-friendly shopping sites

Shopping for toys for a niece’s or nephew’s birthday party generally follows the same routine.  If you’re shopping for a girl, you look for the pink aisle and find the skankiest-looking doll on the shelf, complete with skanky accessories.  If you’re shopping for a boy, you look for the black/blue aisle and grab the most ‘roided-out action figure you can find.  Or, if you want to be the boring aunt/uncle that every kid loathes when it comes time for opening gifts, you can go gender neutral with a puzzle.

Now you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your living room to look for the pink or blue aisle, or listen to someone else’s kid having a toy-aisle freak-out.  Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, Soap.com, BeautyBar.com, and most recently Wag.com, has launched a new site just for toy shopping: Yoyo.com.

You may be thinking that Quidsi is looking to over-complicate the toy shopping process, but the site is actually remarkably direct, easy to navigate, and convenient, with toys categorized by age appropriateness, brand, top picks, and more.  The “toy finder” search box can be customized according to age, gender, budget, and the top Yoyo Picks.  

The “Yoyo Picks” are hand-selected by the Yoyo team to identify the top toys in each category based on criteria such as whether they foster imagination, are ideal for travel, are good for apartment-living, and so on.

The site also features “super filters,” which allow customers to filter their search results by attributes like eco-friendly, award-winning, no assembly required (remember Dad trying to get Barbie out of the box?), and no batteries required.

The site currently carries 20,000 toys, books, games, and more, and the company says it will be adding “significant selection” throughout the rest of 2011.

Like Quidsi’s other sites, Yoyo.com features the same speedy delivery, with free one- to two-day shipping on all items over $49.  And when you’re finished shopping for toys, you can take your shopping cart over to any of Quidsi’s other sites to browse pet items, beauty essentials, or every day drug store goods and pay at one check-out.  Now, when you purchase items from more than one Quidsi store, you can get free shipping on orders of $39.

“We’ve heard again and again that toy shopping can be totally overwhelming, which is why we wanted to create a toy destination that makes the experience as simple and efficient as possible, and hopefully even a little fun,” said Marc Lore, CEO of Quidsi, in a statement.

Quidsi was acquired by Amazon last November for $545 million, just a few months after CEO Marc Lore announced that the company was on track to sell 500 million diapers that year, an estimated four times the amount that Amazon was selling.