DealTime to Acquire Epinions
DealTime intends to incorporate the thousands of consumer opinions and reviews from Epinions onto its own shopping search engine. The company also plans to continue operating Epinions.com as a standalone site.
Although DealTime has published consumer reviews on its site in the past, the addition of Epinions content will enhance the credibility of the advice offered by the shopping search engine.
Epinions has established a reputation as a trustworthy source of consumer buying advice. The site features reviews from "ordinary" consumers, rather than from professional reviewers.
Though anyone can register to become an Epinions reviewer, the site has put in place numerous safeguards to strengthen and enhance what it calls "the web of trust."
This system allows Epinions users to "trust" or "block" the reviews of other members. Reviewers are rated by other Epinions users, and you can click on any reviewer's profile to read these rankings. The profile also displays the names of Epinions users who explicitly trust the reviewer, and the names of others that the reviewer in turn trusts.
It all adds up to a fairly effective form of self-regulation that enables you to get relatively objective opinions from other consumers. By contrast, many of the reviews currently published on DealTime (and most of the other shopping search engines, for that matter) appear to be posted by shills, over-hyping products or retailers, or publishing unrealistically negative criticisms -- in other words, not very trustworthy advice.
By adding Epinions reviews to its site, DealTime significantly improves the quality of advice offered with its search listings. This will benefit both shoppers and merchants who advertise on DealTime through its paid inclusion program.
These listings will also be made available on Epinions.com.
"Consumer-written reviews are very helpful in pre-qualifying shoppers," said Safa Rashtchy, Senior Research Analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "Epinions' consumer reviews and ratings combined with DealTime's shopping search technologies should translate into a powerful product for consumers and merchants alike. Generally, these types of pre-qualified buyers are the most attractive leads in the online marketplace."
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Completion of the transaction is subject to standard closing conditions, including regulatory and shareholder approvals. Upon completion of these conditions, the deal is expected to close in approximately six weeks.
DealTime
http://www.dealtime.com
Epinions
http://www.epinions.com
Inside DealTime's Shopping Search Engine
SearchDay, Nov. 20, 2002
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1120-shopping3.html
DealTime is one of the most popular shopping services on the web, despite the fact that it doesn't directly sell any products to consumers.
Shopping Search and Price Comparison Engines
SearchDay, Nov. 21, 2002
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1121-shopping4.html
Capping off SearchDay's shopping search week, here's a roundup of some of the web's most popular and useful shopping and price comparison search engines.
Getting Started with Shopping Search
SearchDay, Nov. 19, 2002
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1119-shopping2.html
Online shopping is both safe and satisfying, if you start by doing a bit of detective work on both the products you want to buy and the online merchants who sell them.
Shopping Search Engines
http://searchenginewatch.com/links/shopping.html
The search engines listed on this page will check prices at various online stores or locate ecommerce outlets by category. The list is preceded by recent articles from Search Engine Watch on the topic.
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