May 15, 2009

Cashback Gives Lift to MSN/Windows Live Shopping Search

When Microsoft launched its Cashback program last year, many in the search and tech community snickered. It seemed laughable that Microsoft had to pay people to search. A year later, the joke is on the doubters.

New data out from Nielsen shows a 615% growth in MSN/Windows Live Shopping Search in the past year. It should be pointed out, however, that shopping search engines account for a small percentage of the overall search market. However, Microsoft's goal of attacking search niche by niche might just be on the right track.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 2, 2007

Microsoft Acquires Shopping Search Site Jellyfish

Microsoft has acquired Jellyfish, a comparison shopping site that launched in June with a pay-per-action ad model.

Jellyfish acts like a reverse auction through which retailers are ranked according to the amount they agree to lower their prices. The more they drop the price, the higher up in the search results advertisers appear.

On the Live Search blog, a Microsoft rep said, "We think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:48 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2007

Hearst to Acquire Social Shopping Site Kaboodle

Newspaper and magazine giant Hearst Corp. has agreed to acquire social shopping site Kaboodle. It will fit into the Hearst Interactive Media and Hearst Magazines Digital Media units.

"Kaboodle is a natural overlap for Hearst Magazines," Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines, said in a statement. "We think Kaboodle has terrific potential for many of our brands, especially in the fashion, beauty and consumer technology categories. Our readers will be able to find the products featured in our magazines, shop electronically with their friends and get their feedback. It's another means for making sure our readers stay engaged in today's saturated media landscape."

Kaboodle combines shopping search with social media, with several sharing tools added last year. It connects people with similar tastes, and lets users create and join groups. Kaboodle launched its public beta in 2006 and reportedly has more than 2 million unique monthly visitors.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:19 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2007

SEW Experts: The Impact of Comparison Shopping Sites on E-Commerce Sales

In today's By the Numbers column, "The Impact of Comparison Shopping Sites on E-Commerce Sales," Eric Enge discusses comparison-shopping sites, and their impact on buying decisions, resulting in shorter conversion times.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

March 26, 2007

What Makes Us Search Online To Buy Offline?

Our online behaviors certainly influence the retail buying cycle. According to a recent National Retail Federation study, a whopping 93% of respondents spend time online first, including 35% who regularly research and another 58% who occasionally research online before buying in person.

What's surprising is that online media aren't the most important influences in triggering an online shopping search. Well over 40% of respondents individually identified TV, magazines and newspapers as the most important triggers. By contrast, just 28% mentioned e-mail ads and only 25% claimed internet ads of any kind!

Other online communications aren't significant influences either. Only 7% of respondents mention blogs, 9% IM, and 8% online communities as triggers to search online. These sources increase slightly among 18-24 year olds, up to 14% blogs, 22% IM and 21% communities.

After respondents finish searching, communications become more personal. About 69% speak to someone face-to-face. Another 53% send emails, 50% pick up their land-lines and 30% make cell calls.

Once again, online interactions fall short. Just 4% blog, 15% IM and 7% participate in communities. Here you see a pick-up among 18-24 year olds, as 9% blog, 38% IM and 21% use communities. Also some 24% of this age group sends text messages.

So while search dominates the retail discussion, everything else we're doing online hasn't made that kind of singular impact among shoppers yet.

See References: National Retail Federation announcement; Big Research's study approach; and MediaPost's summary .

Posted by at 11:12 PM | Permalink

February 14, 2007

Shopzilla Shuffles Execs, Leads Scripps' Push Online

Shopzilla announced Tuesday that its founding chairman and its president of two years will depart from the shopping search engine in the spring. William Glass, currently chief operating officer of Shopzilla, has been named president, replacing John Phelps, who has served as president of Shopzilla since shortly after it was acquired by E.W. Scripps in June 2005 for $525 million, and was its COO prior to that. Farhad Mohit, 37, Shopzilla's co-founder and chief product officer, will also depart.

Scripps, which had been primarily a newspaper company, has been struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of acquisitions like Shopzilla and U.K. vertical search site uSwitch, as well as expansion of its Web properties for TV brands like HGTV and Food Network. In 2005, the company launched a niche broadband strategy which included a distribution deal with Yahoo Search.

The print side of its business has slid so far that Scripps is rumored to be considering a sale of its newspaper properties.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 6:11 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2007

Krillion Joins the Online Shopping Space

The local online shopping space is quickly crowding up. Given the vast majority of online product research that ends in offline purchases (about 75 percent according to comScore), we've seen a few companies develop over the last 18 months in order to lead and track offline conversions.

NearbyNow launched last summer to provide product and retailer information for malls and shopping centers. StepUp Commerce meanwhile continues to attract an impressive amount of small business advertisers that wish to put their product and inventory information online. StepUp's acquisition by Intuit in September will position it to distribute this capability (along with Google AdWords) across Intuit's massive installed base of QuickBooks users (including 3.7 million small businesses). Finally, ShopLocal works with big box retailers to bring their circular information (product sales, availability and pricing) online.

Today, Krillion launched with a similar focus on this big box segment. More specifically, it is going after buyers for "considered purchase" items. According to co-founder and CEO Joel Toledano, this includes products that are more than $500 which, because of their size and price, are more likely to be bought locally.

"These tend to be larger bulky items that are bought in a physical store because they might be a touch and feel purchase such as a flat screen TV, or something that you want to talk to a salesperson about,” says Toledano. The company will start with an emphasis in the $18 billion home appliances category, but will eventually grow into other categories that similarly include large ticket items, such as consumer electronics.

One of Krillion's silver bullets will be its proprietary crawling technology that brings in raw product data, combined with its integration of this data into a series of search results pages that correspond to the many combinations of specific products, brands, categories and 40,000 US local areas. After doing this for the past 6 months, the company at launch has more than 275 million product and location results pages.

"This focuses on the ready to buy local customer who has done their research, is at the end of the buying cycle and is now essentially putting their hand up when their doing their query and saying 'here's what I'm looking for, here's where I am, just tell me who carries it'," says Toledano. "Think of it as the yellow pages meets Shopping.com"

Instead of considering itself a destination site for local shopping, Krillion will push content out using SEO so that these individual product results pages can be found in Google organic results for local product queries.

“There are only a half dozen brands like eBay and Amazon.com where people actually go to the URL bar and type it in," said Toledano. Beyond those, whether its Shopping.com or Shopzilla, consumers on a broad swath simply don't know those brands. They type in the product or retailer in a Google Yahoo! search box.”

The company will also integrate targeted ads throughout these specific product pages including links to complimentary products such as accessories or items that are part of corresponding appliance sets.

Given the many permutations of location and specific products, some will be more obscure than others and recieve more traffic than others. Regardless, the targeted nature of these searches, and their positioning near the end of the buying cycle for high consideration items, will make the ad space more valuable.

“To an advertiser, there is a great deal of value in the targeted nature of this," says Toledano. They don't have to do shotgun broad brush approach to advertise on a general category such as the term ‘digital camera', where they are lumped in with many other advertisers.”

This could be attractive to big box advertisers, and offer more of a granular local product search than is currently offered by ShopLocal and others. Gaining traffic and communicating its value to consumers could be its biggest challenge at the onset, but given that it will piggyback on the already existing brand affinity and traffic of Google, this could be easier for Krillion.

Its success here will therefore come down to its ability to execute successful SEO tactics throughout its hundreds of millions of product result pages.

Posted by Mike Boland at 9:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 31, 2007

Retailers Should Focus on SEO, Shopping Search

Retailers should move beyond their traditional paid search campaigns and pay attention to SEO and shopping search engines, according to a new study from TrafficLeader. We talked to the authors for today's SearchDay, "Search Presents Challenges for Retailers."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:42 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2007

Online Spending Tops $100 Billion in 2006

According to an Infoworld report on Y! news, online shopping increased 24 percent over the previous year, with consumers spending $102.1 billion in 2006, topping the $100 billion mark for the first time in history.

As predicted, Cyber Monday (nov. 27, 2006) was not the busiest online shopping day of the year, as a total of eleven other days saw higher spending.

The top three spending days of the holiday season were:

Dec. 13th - $666.9 million Dec. 11th - $660.8 million Dec. 4th - $647.5 million

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 1:52 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2006

Online Shopping, on your Phone

Most online comparison shopping sites are rich with text and graphic images displaying all manner of info about the wares they are peddline. That makes for an awkward interface if you're trying to check out a site on your phone. Fortunately, most major online retailers have slimmed-down search interfaces that let you quickly access product information from your phone. Gary Price has a roundup of these services in today's article, Shopping Search, Via Mobile Phone.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:11 AM | Permalink

Ho, Ho, Ho - Holiday Shopping Search Skyrockets

This year's Cyber Monday numbers shattered the record books, with significant increases of online shopping site visits and a reported $600 in online retail sales, up about 42% over last year. But to call it the biggest online shopping day of the year may be premature; as online retailers offer special shipping and other tantalizing offers to consumers, traffic to retail websites is increasing steadily in the midnight hour.

In the most recent issue of SearchReturn, Detlev Johnson noted that we may not have seen the biggest online shopping day yet, as last minute deals and exclusive offers will continue to drive online sales higher as Christmas day approaches. According to the Information Week article Johnson references, online retailing is starting to look a lot like brick and mortar sales these days, driving customers to their stores in droves with sales of the bluelight variety.

With Overstock.com, Macys.com and Amazon.com running limited online specials, consumers clicked on to those sites repeatedly to be one of the lucky customers. Admittedly, once I read this - I was sucked into Overstock as well - signing up for a chance to get the elusive PS3 console for only $50.

Meanwhile, Hitwise reports a 4.8% increase in traffic this week to the Top 100 US Retail index over last year during the same period.

Toys, electronics, apparel and accessories, understandably top the list of most popular search terms, increasing exponentially over the previous week.

“Our search term data reveals that the 2006 holiday season is the first time that new digital toys have outpaced some of the more traditional items in our top searched-for-list such as Barbie, Bratz and American Girl,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. “However, Baby Alive, a doll originally introduced in 1973, took two spots in the top ten, demonstrating a renewed interest in retro toys.”

Should we assume, then that the 'fisher price digital camera', up 110 percent in search traffic, fits into that digital toy category or the electronics one?

In the electronics category, the Nintendo Wii is outpacing Playstation 3 on the order of three to one, although both consoles are in short supply, clearly the Wii appears to be in higher demand.

For apparel and accessories, Hitwise also notes Ugg boots have made a triumphant return to winter fashion. Apparently, that means Uggs must be the perfect boot to tuck your "skinny jeans" (into) - one of the most popular searches on SortPrice.com this holiday season. SortPrice.com, a shopping engine we covered earlier this year, notes these products as their most popular search terms among 3 to 4 Million unique monthly visitors:

1. Canon PowerShot SD600 2. Apple iPod Nano 3. Microsoft Zune Digital Player 4. LG Chocolate Cell Phone 5. Diamond Earrings 6. Men's Watches 7. Skinny Jeans 8. Women's Ankle Boots 9. Satchel Handbags 10. Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2006

AskTheLocal UK Shopping Search Engine

AskTheLocal is a shopping search engine with a subtle difference; rather than find websites that offer particular products it matches the search query with a postcode to enable shoppers to visit a shop in person to buy the product. Another important difference is the reference to 'postcode' rather than zip code, because AskTheLocal is a UK resource.

The concept is very simple - retailers list their products with the search engine and users input their location and then search for products using free text terms rather than a listing or menu approach. The results screen then usually displays a photograph of the product, a description, the option of comparing prices or linking into Technorati in the hope that someone will have written about it, other items from that retailer and of course the price. Information is also given with respect to the physical location of the shop offering the product, the opening hours and telephone number. Finally there is a link to a map - the emphasis with AskTheLocal really is on locating products and then going and physically buying them.

It's a simple idea and well executed; while I have a few (minor) reservations about the service it makes a real change to find a local search engine for local people, and it is certainly worth exploring if you're in the UK. A similar service (not associated with AskTheLocal) is ShopLocal, so American readers need not feel left out.

AskTheLocal has already got a number of high profile retailers on board, such as Marks and Spencer, Argos, ToysRus and JJB which is helpful, given that searchers are almost bound to find some results for their searches. There are as yet only a very small number of local shops or chains, which limits the value of the service and I suspect areas of the country that are not well represented; I ran a search for a product and got results from shops that were up to 28 miles away and then the next result was for a shop that was over 200 miles away, so coverage is patchy at the moment, though hopefully it will increase in due course.

I would have liked to have seen a link to a retailers website as well - while I appreciate the emphasis of the search engine is on providing physical locations for products a link to a website is to be expected. Most of the items did have good descriptions, but I found a few cases when the result was limited to the title of a product while didn't actually help very much, though to be fair this is a criticism of the retailer and not the search engine itself.

While the service is still quite basic additional functionality is being introduced; the option of being able to check availability and the option of including discount coupons makes a lot of sense.

All in all, it's a search engine and concept that I think shows great promise, and once it has more large retailers signed up, and especially a lot more small niche specialised shops getting involved this could prove to be a very useful resource indeed.

Postscript from Greg: In addition to ShopLocal in the U.S., NearbyNow and StepUp (acquired by Intuit) are putting local business inventory online.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 9:40 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

Like.com Offers Visual Fashion Search

Image search company Riya has applied its matching technology to a new fashion shopping site called Like. The idea is that you if you find a fashion item you like -- a particular handbag, pair of shoes, watch or jewelry -- the search engine will find related products by examining the actual image. You can keyword search, browse products or browse items worn by celebrities to get matches.

I love watches, so I gave it a spin. In particular, I have a large collection of Swatches. So, I started off to see what swatches would bring back. I got plenty of matches, and a "Hawaii" swatch on the first page caught my eye.

Clicking on it brought up a new page, allowing me to pick what I liked the most about it in degrees using sliders, for these criteria:

• Color
• Shape
• Pattern

It was the pattern more than anything else, so I kicked that slider up. The results changed, bringing up mainly heart monitoring watches first. Not what I wanted!

Next I tried browse mode. I was able to drill into the analog round matches, but none of these were to my fancy.

Now it was time for what's clearly the hype factor -- search for something that a celebrity is wearing. The gallery has only two men, and while I have little in common with either Diddy or Brad Pitt, I went the Brad route. One shot of him was when he was wearing a watch, so I clicked on that.

A page came up with watches similar to what he had. Was this image matching magic? Preset examples always make me wary -- they typically have been refined and fine-tuned. Even if not, I don't know that I need image matching technology to easily find watches like he was wearing. Here -- see accessories like those worn by Cameron Diaz, no image search required.

The real test will be when, as Somewhat Frank says, you'll be able to upload images of your own and do searches. Or, you can play with searches of the many existing images and see how it goes. I wasn't blown away by it, but I only did the few queries above. Another product, another search, perhaps it would be great. It's certainly worth trying and keeping in mind.

Riya's Like.com Is First True Visual Image Search at TechCrunch talks about the background, the idea that Riya is a leading company trying to match images based on images, rather than words. Riya's received lots of attention over the past year for its technology, but it's notable that so far, the company doesn't seem to have had much financial success. This type of matching is the third direction it has now gone in.

First, Riya seemed targeted to help you upload photos of people and do face recognition to find others. Then Google was rumored to be interested, though that never went through. Google later acquired another image recognition company, Neven Vision.

Riya shifted to being a web image search service, which remains running at Riya.com. The current focus on fashion products is tied to where Riya says users were most interested. ZDNet has more on this. You can also check out CEO Munjal Shah's blog for background.

Need another review? The Wall Street Journal takes a look for paid subscribers in Where to Find a Famous Look and seems mostly happy.

Like the idea? Here are some reports of shopping search engines with matching features you might like:

• Smarter Launches Visual Search
• Become Adds Color Search
• ShopWiki Launches Search By Color

Postscript: Pixsta tips me off to Chez Imelda, where they power visual shoe search. Gary Price also has a list of other visual search services here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:41 AM | Permalink

October 31, 2006

Smarter Launches Visual Search

Seems that just last week I mentioned a shopping comparison engine launching a color search feature. Well, this week it's Smarter's turn to take the colorful spotlight.

Smarter.com today launched visual search. Visual search can be found by clicking on the Clothing & Accessories tab or by searching for any product within that section. Right now it's is a bit hidden as the consumer has to click on a small link under the header.

Differentiator here is that Smarter's visual search is all about clothing. Users select gender, then a top (shirt, sweater, etc.), then a bottom (pants, shorts, etc.), then choose the color for each. Smarter then returns two bands of products (the top on top, the bottom on the bottom) so users can see what the shirt and shorts might look like together.

More information (with colorful screenshots) on ComparisonEngines or try out Visual Search now.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:07 PM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

Search Influenced $15.2 Billion In Consumer Electronics Spending Through First Half

As the latest in an ongoing series of studies that capture the evolving and complex nature of consumer behavior today, Yahoo yesterday released findings from a joint study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study was fielded in June of this year and surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults who were pre-qualified as intending to make consumer electronics (CE) purchases.

The study looked at five CE categories: cell phones, computers, digital cameras, MP3 players and televisions. Below are the top-level findings:

• The amount of online research was tied directly to the price of the product. Because higher priced products are more "considered" purchases, people spent more time doing online research. The range of time was nine hours for cell phones at the low end and 15 hours for TVs at the high end. The average duration of online research prior to purchase was 12 hours.

• Of all purchasers of CE products in the study, online buyers were a significant minority (29%), while most purchases happened in local stores (71%). Of those buying offline, almost three quarters conducted online research prior to purchase.

• Search engines in particular were used by 45% of the survey population that ultimately purchased in a local retail store.

• On average CE consumers in the study used visited six manufacturer and/or retail sites before purchase. In navigating to those sites 55% used a search engine to go to the site, while 46% directly entered a URL. Approximately 10% followed a link from another site.

• In terms of the range of sources used by purchasers (both online and off), the top four in order were as follows: 1) Internet 2) print 3) word of mouth 4) retail/other.

• In terms of recall, CE consumers remembered seeing ads in various media in the following order: 1) print ads in magazines or newspapers 2) TV ads 3) Internet display ads 4) email 5) radio and 6) billboards. For Internet display advertising 40% indicated they recalled seeing an ad for the product.

• One of the conclusions of the study was that of the $32.5 billion spent on the five consumer electronics categories in the first six months of the year, online research influenced $25.1 billion of that spending. Among the online sources, the study also concluded that search had a direct or indirect influence on $15.2 billion of CE buying.

Finally, the study examined the differences between “searchers” and “non-searchers,” "based on self-reported search engine usage during their research and purchase process." This is what the research determined:

"Searchers, defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed. They are more educated about what they buy, increasingly likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are often considered a resource of information by friends and family. They consider more brands and are 114 percent more likely to consider Internet display advertising in their research process."

Posted by Greg Sterling at 3:52 PM | Permalink

October 23, 2006

Become Adds Color Search

Become follows Etsy and Shopwiki in adding a search by color feature. Once consumers perform a shopping (as opposed to research) search, "a Color Search bar appears at the top right of the results page. Users can mouse over the color they desire from over 1000 shades to find exactly the red shirt, grey suit, pink shoes or pumpkin-colored dishes they want."

I have a screenshot posted at ComparisonEngines, but I encourage you to try it out for yourself by searching for a dress, handbag, or seven jeans. Here's the press release.

Become also recently redesigned its site.

Posted by Brian Smith at 4:03 PM | Permalink

October 2, 2006

Why IAC's Pronto Will Succeed: Partnership With Ask

There are many reasons to like Pronto among the many crawler based shopping search engines:

- Comprehensiveness (read last week's press release) - Upcoming features that provide a better user experience - Monetization through an ad system not called Google AdSense - Not relying solely on the PPC engines for traffic - Online ad market is hot and will continue to grow - Ecommerce is hot and will continue to grow

While these things are the building blocks of a great new shopping service, they aren't the be all, end all. Other companies can and will develop powerful crawling technology (although Pronto is obviously proud of their own). There are other companies in the shopping space whose sole focus seems to be to provide a better user experience. Other companies will develop powerful ad systems (Kevin Ryan has done it before) or focus on high CPM based graphical advertising. Other companies have and will continue to focus on marketing channels besides the PPC engines. Oh, and everyone is benefiting from strong ad rates and ecommerce growth.

So you want the real reason why Pronto will succeed? The company is part of the IAC family. At some point in the next year, assuming Pronto continues to innovate and build on its solid foundation, the company will replace PriceGrabber as Ask's Smart Answer partner for all product searches. This was by no means confirmed with Pronto or Ask or IAC, but it's an obvious evolution.

And here's why it matters:

Ask.com currently has a 6% search marketshare with 6.5B searches being conducted in August (according to comScore). Assuming no growth in monthly searches ever (which isn't realistic), that means there are 390m searches conducted on Ask each month. I'd estimate that 20% or 78m of those searches are product related. Now if the Smart Answers featuring Pronto are triggered for about 70% of those searches (probably a very high percentage compared to the number PriceGrabber gets), there will be aprx. 54m total impressions for Pronto's listings. Assuming a CTR of 6% for those listings, Pronto will receive aprx. 3.2m clicks per month on it's listings or aprx. 40m clicks per year. A strong start.

There are a number of business issues to work out before Pronto replaces PriceGrabber. First, I don't know when PriceGrabber's contract runs out. I asked a long time ago and got no answer. Second, I'm sure that PriceGrabber's listings monetize a hell of a lot better than Pronto's listings (every PriceGrabber click is paid). So if Ask changes partners, it's going to lose out on some revenue...yes, Pronto can and will increase it's CPM, but it could take a long time to be really competitive with the established players. The business decision for Diller and crew then revolves around the opportunity cost of cutting revenue (albeit probably a small percentage) for Ask in favor of building up an ancillary IAC brand. Knowing a bit about Diller's track record, I have a feeling he's going to be fine with backing Pronto.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:01 PM | Permalink

Need A Costume For Halloween? Try The CostumeZee Costume Search Engine!

This is an entirely commercial operation, but with Halloween looming on the horizon, one that may prove useful. CostumeZee is a search engine that enables searchers to locate costumes for particular events, such as Halloween, or themes such as Pirates. Costumes for both children and adults are available, as well as appropriate accessories. The links do all seem to take searchers to American based sites however, so if you're outside the US, order early and cross your fingers.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 10:11 AM | Permalink

September 25, 2006

Goodbye Froogle; Hello Google Product Results In Web Search

Froogle, Google's shopping search engine that launched with big hopes back in 2002, is to be deemphasized in place of product listings integrated into regular Google search results.

The news has come out through Google's participation at the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance Summit last week in San Francisco. IDG has coverage of it here, saying:

A Google official shared the news with attendees at the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit in San Francisco this week, according to people at the conference.

When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, wrote Bear Stearns analysts in a note published on Friday.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service, wrote the analysts, who attended the Google official's presentation.

The association with the eBay sellers group and product results "powered" by Google Base is causing some confusion, in my view, about eBay "killer" Google Base "replacing" Froogle. Let's back up.

• Froogle used to have its own feed mechanism to allow merchants to submit products. This system predated the system for sending material into Google Base.  
• In June, the Froogle submission system went away, replaced by submission to Google Base (and see also here). If Froogle was being "replaced" by Google Base, this is the time it happened.  
• Google Base has never been designed as a standalone service for searchers. The user interface there hasn't been that appealing, nor have searchers been seriously directed to it. In fact, the search box on the Google Base home page was just dropped, not something you do for a service designed for searchers. It is something you do, however, to help Google Base's mission of being a centralized submission tool for Google.  
• Google has been testing ways to flow customized results from Google Base into regular Google, to help deal with the invisible tabs issue I've long written about. My Google Real Estate? It's Google Base Again, Google's Vertical Play from earlier this year explains this integration in more depth.  
• Putting product results into regular Google results makes sense, just as it does for any type of vertical or custom results that Google does. This has mainly been through OneBox results, but the new Google Base-style placements allow for the search box on results pages to contain more options, ones helpful to narrowing for product or other type of vertical searching.

Froogle as a brand and destination set for demotion was pretty clear when it was dropped from the Google home page last month, a position it held since 2004. That placement never helped Froogle much, in part because many people simply ignore the little links above the search box entirely. In addition, in my view, Froogle is a cutesy name that never explain what Froogle was -- a shopping search engine. If it had been called Google Shopping, take-up might have been better.

Given this, "deemphasizing" Froogle as a destination isn't hard given that few seem to think of it as a destination anyway. Back in July, Hitwise found it ranked ninth among Google top 29 properties -- and sharewise, not that far behind Google Video (0.45 percent of all visitors to the top 20 Google sites went to Froogle versus 0.47 percent going to Google Video).

Google Video's move on to the home page helped that service and hurt Froogle, as Hitwise later notes. But again, sharewise, it was hardly noticeable. Froogle dropped to the 0.02 percent range, while Google Video rose to the 0.06 percent range. In other words, practically no one was going to either service compared to things like Google web search overall.

That's why better integration of all vertical search results into listings will be coming at Google, as well as other search engines. But I hope we will see a renamed Google Shopping service still survive, with a custom home page and URL. Shopping search is important enough that it deserves a standalone brand.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:00 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2006

'Local Shopping' Competition Intensifying

Several years ago I was in a room with Chuck Davis, then CEO of BizRate (Shopzilla), and pitched him the idea of including local, offline store information in the company's database. He cited the complexity of getting the local information and the absence of a competitive need for it at the time. Times have changed and local (together with "social shopping") is the next frontier for comparison engines.

A range of competitors, including NearbyNow, ShopLocal, Yokel, Become, CNET and Froogle (and soon more newspapers), are offering some version of local, offline shopping data and inventory information to consumers. And today Yokel announced expanded local store and inventory information in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here's more information from my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 5:39 PM | Permalink

August 29, 2006

Update On Coupon Shortcut, Yahoo Adds Cheap Shortcut

Last week I told you about Yahoo's new Coupon Shortcut. In that post, I said that the comments on Adam Viener's Revenews post seem to suggest that Coupon Cabin is providing the coupon codes, but Chris Saito of Yahoo! Shopping told me that Yahoo! “aggregates coupons/rebates from multiple sources but hasn't released specific partners.”

When I talked to Chris, he also alerted me to the new 'cheap' shortcut which highlights products which have been marked down in Yahoo! Shopping/Yahoo! Product Submit. Just search for 'cheap [insert product]'. Here are some examples: cheap plasma tv, cheap shirts, cheap jeans.

The cheap shortcut is the latest example of vertical results (shopping) creeping (as Danny would say) into regular search results. If you're a merchant, it's more and more important to market through the shopping comparison engines. If you're not using Yahoo! Product Submit/Yahoo! Shopping, you're missing out on potentially valuable traffic from regular Yahoo! searches. If you're not using Google Base, you're missing out on potentially valuable traffic from regular Google searches. Everyone should be working on search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC), but don't forget to test out the vertical search engines.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:33 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2006

Yahoo Adds Coupon Shortcut, Making Finding Coupons Easy

Adam Viener of ReveNews.com discovered a Yahoo! Shortcut which gives searchers quick and easy access to coupon codes.

Adam highlighted a search for kodak gallery coupon codes. Here are some other examples: circuit city coupon, vistaprint coupon, netflix coupon code, and dell coupon code.

This is a great service for consumers who are spared the trouble of weeding through creatively written sponsored listings and pages of organic listings claiming to have the best coupons and then returning out of date deals. This is also a potential win for Yahoo! as affiliate revenue can add up pretty quickly.

The comments on Adam's post seem to indicate that the coupons are sourced through a third party called Coupon Cabin, but there's no confirmation of that. Last year Yahoo! tested out a different partner for coupons on Yahoo! Shopping.

Posted by Brian Smith at 2:44 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

NearbyNow Brings New 'Inventory' To Local Search

The "holy grail" of online shopping is local inventory information. Paradoxical as it may sound I say that because the overwhelming majority of transactions occur in local stores and that isn't going to change any time soon. Though e-commerce is growing fast, growing much faster is the influence of the Internet on offline transactions. Those Internet-influenced local transactions, worth more than $350 billion annually and climbing, typically start online in the form of price comparison shopping or product research.

Yet real-time inventory information has so far been elusive for most shopping sites – even those that offer local information, including ShopLocal, Yokel, Froogle, CNET and Become. All of these, to varying degrees, have local data but most of it is "proxy information" for inventory (i.e., item is normally carried or on special).

A new site called NearbyNow is pulling together real-time POS ("point of sale") inventory information from retailers large and small and presenting it through local-mall portal sites. The first up is for the company is Eastridge Mall in San Jose, Ca. On this site you can search for specific products and sale items. Nothing can be purchased online; it's all about driving people into local stores.

NearbyNow CEO Scott Dunlap says that virtually 100% of inventory is going to be there for all the stores in the mall. For example, here's a search for "kids shoes." I can see every store in the mall that sells kids shoes, the prices and the specific shoes available. It's much more efficient for consumers and the conversion rates for merchants are going to be very, very high. Retailers are also going to get a better sense of how the Internet is directly driving offline sales than from buying general paid-search.

A noteworthy site feature is the "reserve this product" in-store pickup capability (like Circuit City's very successful in-store pickup feature). Every item online can be "reserved" for onsite purchase at the local store. Consumers can be contacted by email or a store clerk to confirm the item is at the store or to otherwise inform them it's not (offering the opportunity to direct consumers to another store that does have the item).

Think about holiday shopping and how efficient this would be. Consumers could do all their local shopping online and then simply go from store to store at the mall picking up and paying for those items.

Another critical dimension of the offering is that NearbyNow is also working with in-mall kiosk vendors to provide the same product search onsite. In other words, a local shopping engine that offers comprehensive, structured data for only the stores in the mall, in the actual mall. NearbyNow has said it will sell contextually relevant or competitive ads on those kiosks (and its mall sites). And one can imagine that as much as the site will drive conversions, those in-mall searches and kiosk ads are going to drive even higher transaction rates.

The kiosk use case is similar to the wireless scenario that everyone has been salivating over for the past couple of years. The idea is that in a wireless context, the consumer is very close in time to a purchase and the need for the product or service is immediate. That's equally true for NeabyNow's mall sites and, even more so, for the in-mall kiosks. But there's the additional opportunity to expose and sell even more stuff to onsite consumers through the kiosks (or to users accessing the site on wireless devices).

Wireless users with smartphones (Motorola Q, Treo, Blackberry, etc.) will be able to perform those same local product searches, whether in transit or at the mall, by accessing the local mall site on their mobile devices. Dunlap said that text messaging is coming (and so are contextually relevant text-based advertising opportunities).

I also spoke to Dunlap about in-store kiosks as another potential layer of this offering – consumers within a Macy's or Bloomingdales search for inventory items and then are exposed to specials or offerings from other departments.

NearbyNow is currently buying paid search to build consumer awareness (driving people to product-specific results pages within the local mall site). But considerable promotion is going on within the local mall. In other words, the mall itself promotes its local shopping portal powered by NearbyNow. This is a highly qualified consumer audience that will likely be eager to use the mall site in the future.

In addition to providing the infrastructure for these local mall sites and kiosks, NearbyNow is in discussions to potentially license its local inventory data to third parties (think shopping engines, local newspapers, directories, etc.). Dunlap wants to do that in a careful way that doesn't promote e-commerce at the expense of the participating retailers. But I would expect NearbyNow's biz dev team to be very busy fairly soon.

I've argued many times in the past that shopping sites and portals will need to include local inventory information or be outflanked by those that eventually do. It's inevitable -- even more so now.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:34 PM | Permalink

August 9, 2006

Sortprice.com - Same Shopping Search, Different User Experience

Yesterday Sortprice put out a press release about being a 'next generation' shopping comparison engine. While I'm not so sure I'd agree with that, the larger players in the industry should pay attention to this little operation.

The press release was partly about a rollover feature allowing consumers to "scan though countless products and view their favorite denim as an enlarged thumbnail without even a click of a button." This is nothing special on its own. And truthfully, I wasn't even going to write a post about it. Become.com launched something similar at the end of May and Smarter.com launched their rollover feature a couple weeks ago.

What's important is that Sortprice and the newer shopping comparison engines are thinking about improving the user experience.

Another example on Sortprice is 'Shop, Drag, and Drop'; the ability to create a non category specific comparison list. For example, a shopper can match a tie, shoes and a jacket. These lists can then be shared with friends. Danny covered this feature in May. Again, nothing revolutionary, but as far as I know, Windows Live Shopping is the only other shopping engine to offer this functionality. Here's another one...at the bottom of each Sortprice shopping search page, there are XML feeds available. And Sortprice didn't just put up an RSS button which most users don't know what to do with, they "chickletized" their site with 'Add to Google', 'Add to My Yahoo!', and 'Add to My MSN' buttons.

Ok, I'll be the first to admit that Sortprice has a long way to go in terms of overall design and user experience, but what's important is that the company is testing things out. Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and NexTag should can learn from Sortprice.

And then there's Sortprice's product listing model. Most of the feed based shopping comparison engines work on a CPC model; every time a shopper clicks on a product listing, a merchant is charged. Sortprice has a completely different model. The company will list a small subset of your products for free and then, as opposed to charging on a click basis, Sortprice has an Enhanced Listing Program in which merchants pay a flat monthly rate. This can be a very attractive alternative to the more established CPC model.

Posted by Brian Smith at 5:59 PM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

Find 'Nearby Stores' With Become

There's lots of data from many sources that reflects the dominant consumer shopping paradigm involving the Internet: research online, buy locally. Even though e-commerce, excluding Travel, will approach $150 billion this year, according to Forrester Research, that's a small fraction of offline spending. But more and more of that offline buying is influenced in one way or another by the Internet.

Among the shopping engines, ShopLocal and Froogle offer local buying information. CNET also has some local inventory information (via Channel Intelligence). Now Become.com has joined that illustrious group with a new "nearby stores" feature.

According to the company:

Launched with over 30,000 retail locations, “Nearby Stores” listings include dynamic Yahoo! Maps™ so shoppers can visually locate the closest merchants . . . To find local merchants, Become.com visitors simply choose the item they want to purchase such as “digital camera,” click on the “compare prices” button and input their zip code. Nearby Stores are indicated on the far right column with a link to detailed store information, including addresses, telephone numbers, hours of operation and maps.

Here's an example details page (thanks to Gary Price). Become will be demonstrating the new feature at the company's booth next week at SES.

Local buying/inventory information will need to be integrated by all the shopping engines over time for them to remain competitive.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 3:49 PM | Permalink

July 24, 2006

Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details.

As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs. the 51 returns for discussion forums (which I really wanted). This is a search engine starting to answer my questions as opposed to just returning a bunch of irrelevant results.

So how does this work? Jon immediately went over my head in his explanation (all of you know how sophomoric my tech undertanding is), but here's what I was able to grok. The 4 month project started with human input to define the parameters for a buying guide or discussion forum (a buying guide has characteristics X, Y, and Z while a discussion forum has characteristics D, R, Q, and Y). Then the machine learning takes over, looking at each and every page that Become.com crawls to try to put it in a bucket. But this has to be done in an efficient manner balancing precision and recall and this has to be done for all 4 filters. And then there's the added issue that one web page can be both a product review and product detail page (think Amazon's product pages). As a marketer, I have no idea how difficult this is to pull off, but it didn't sound easy and I don't see many other companies with a similar feature set.

What immediately came to mind when Jon explained Search Zoom was Kosmix's filtering and personalization options. Kosmix also crawls the web, searching over 3.2b pages, and has what I'd consider advanced filtering options. The company also looks at individual web pages, not just the website as a whole.

So if I find the results from Become's Search Zoom so helpful, why don't the general search engines do this? Jon explained "If you?re a general purpose search engine, you can?t have 30 buttons across the top. As a vertical search engine, we just wanted to limit the choices to the decisions that people who need to make a buying decision need. We have a more constrained problem. We can help people in ways that Google as a general search engine can't."

With Search Zoom, Become has an extremely useful and easy to understand product which it should try to syndicate. As I mentioned last week in reference to Zillow's partnership with Yahoo!, biz dev deals are an attractive alternative to spending millions on the PPC engines. First on the biz dev list should be Shopping.com. Become is syndicating Shopping.com's price comparison listings to supplement its own...there's already a relationship. Shopping.com recently added a 'Buying Guides' section. This could be 227x better with Become's assistance.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:00 PM | Permalink

July 19, 2006

Can IAC's Pronto Shopping Search Compete?

IAC, parent of search engine Ask.com, has had a shopping search tool for some time, in the form of Pronto, a downloadable application. Recently, IAC created a web-based version of Pronto, which has some useful features—but it joins a crowded field with hundreds of other players. SEW correspondent Brian Smith takes a look at Pronto and muses about the challenges it faces in today's SearchDay article, Up Close with IAC's Pronto Shopping Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:11 PM | Permalink

July 7, 2006

Google Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines

Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I’m not sure they’ll stand for it.

The shopping comparison engines are some of the biggest purchasers of pay per click (PPC) listings on Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM). Companies like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and NexTag are also some of the savviest search marketers in the biz, looking at revenue derived from each and every click. Whether you call it arbitrage or not, many of the shopping comparison engines purchase keywords to drive traffic to their sites and then monetize that traffic through their own PPC listings, ideally at a higher rate than what they paid Google or Yahoo!.

As PPC rates on the general search engines have risen over the last couple years, the shopping comparison engines have had to raise their own PPC rates to cover their increased costs. A number of people I trust say that this is faulty logic, but I would say that the rise in PPC costs on the general search engines is definitely one factor in the rise in PPC rates on the shopping comparison engines.

Google Adwords ranks PPC ads ?based on their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score on Google.com. (For the top positions above Google search results, we use the actual CPC.) The Quality Score is determined by the keyword?s performance history on Google: its clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, landing page quality, and other relevancy factors.? (Full Explanation).

Now here comes Google Checkout. If you?re an AdWords advertiser, you can hook up your Adwords and Checkout accounts and display a Google Checkout shopping cart icon in your Adwords ads. If Google Checkout takes off, consumers will start to look for ads that have the Checkout icon, thus driving up the CTR of these ads. Because CTR is one determinant of ranking on Adwords, the merchants who list the icon should move up in ranking.

The comparison engines will not be able to show the Google Checkout shopping cart icon in their listings (unless some special deal is struck). This means that to effectively compete with the merchants who are displaying the icon, the shopping comparison engines will have to increase their maximum CPC bid, driving up costs.

If the shopping comparison engines are paying more on Google Adwords, they are going to have to raise the minimum price floors they charge merchants. Merchants are already pissed at the perceived high costs on the shopping comparison engines (I say perceived because I don?t think that all advertisers are properly tracking costs or optimizing listings and therefore could actually afford to bid a lot higher) so rate increases are always met with disdain.

Most of the large shopping comparison engines will increase their pricing in preparation for the holiday season. This is a normal phenomenon because conversion rate goes up during the holiday shopping season, but I think the engines also raise their rates to cover their own click costs. Now add the Google Checkout factor and shopping comparison engines might have to raise their rates even more.

To see a sample of what the Google Checkout shopping cart icon looks like in an AdWords ad, see my full Google Checkout post.

Posted by Brian Smith at 11:32 AM | Permalink

July 6, 2006

Smarter.com Updates Site

Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling.

While Smarter is one of the little guys in the shopping comparison engine industry (Shopping.com and Shopzilla being the leaders according to comScore data), these are bold moves which show how serious the company is about becoming a major player.

The clustering Smarter is working on isn?t revolutionary, but it?s a pretty significant leap forward for the company. And if it?s true that some other shopping comparison engines do this type of work through cheap manual labor in other countries, then it?s a big deal.

Check out this search for 'women's sunglasses' as an example.

As opposed to just Brand, Store, and Price Range, you can now filter by Frame Color, Frame Material, Lens Color, Lens Material, Lens Shape, Sunglasses Shape, and Sunglasses Type. This is an incredible improvement that makes searching for sunglasses online pretty much like searching for sunglasses at your local Sunglass Hut.

Read more, including an interview with Smarter.com Co-founder Harry Tsao, at ComparisonEngines.com.

Posted by Brian Smith at 5:29 PM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

ShopWiki Launches Search By Color

ShopWiki this morning launched its 'Search by Color' feature which lets consumers quickly and easily filter search results by color. From the press release: Accessible on ShopWiki's search results page, the Search by Color tool displays more than 50,000 RGB colors for shoppers to choose from. A shopper looking for a turquoise v-neck shirt, for example, can search "women's v-neck" then select the desired shade from the color tool. Once selected, the search results are instantly updated to list those shirts available in the chosen hue.

You have to play around with Shop by Color to really understand the power of this feature.

Expect to see more innovative features like this out of Shopwiki soon. Read my ComparisonEngines.com post to put this new feature in perspective.

Posted by Brian Smith at 11:43 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site

Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site.

I'm not sure about THE N9NE, but according to Chris Saito [thanks for the quick response!] Trovetopia turns out to be a "test bed for [Yahoo!] APIs – it’s built entirely using the web services available on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

It's cool to see Yahoo playing around with its own APIs. Yahoo Tech is another place to see the power of the APIs. Considering that I get an email each week about people interested in using a shopping comparison engine API, it's smart to put these services on display.

Posted by Brian Smith at 9:48 AM | Permalink

June 7, 2006

Yahoo! Shopping Launches Blog

Chris Saito announced the launch of the Yahoo! Shopping Blog at Internet Retailer 2006 yesterday.

While I wasn't at the conference, Chris filled me in, saying the blog is a great way to merchandise products, drive engagement (subscribe through RSS, build loyalty, etc.), and drive transactions. The blog will get more promotion on Yahoo! Shopping over time. There will be 4-5 people contributing (David Beach and Joe Lazarus have each contributed thus far).

In the inaugural post, Beach explained ?The Yahoo! Shopping Blog does not allow advertisers or sponsors to influence editorial decisions in the creation of blog posts. We just like to find good things so you can find them too.? Today's find? The Skyrail Marble Roller Coaster.

Last week I wrote about the opportunity for shopping comparison engines to blog, highlighting smart, informative, and irreverant blogs like Ice.com's Sparkle Like The Stars, Glam's What's Haute, and EvoGear's Mugatu Says.

Email newsletters are great marketing tools, but there are many benefits to blogs. Nathan Decker, EvoGear's Director of Ecommerce explained "the company's blogs allow us to communicate the flavor of our company (anti-notfunny & authenticity / credibility), feed qualified traffic to Evogear, and give various solid team members a side project to leverage creativity and talent.

Other shopping comparison engine blogs include Become's Pocket Change, mySimon's Shopping Picks, and ShoptoIt.ca's Off The Rack.

Posted by Brian Smith at 10:59 AM | Permalink

May 26, 2006

NetRatings Data: The Local Angle

Danny posted here about April Nielsen//NetRatings data reflecting that Google had crossed the 50% threshold in search market share. I want to point to another part of the release, which jumped out at me: the Internet driving people to local retailers ("big boxes" in this case).

All of the top five shopping queries according to Nielsen are ultimately local:

1. ?home depot? 2. ?walmart? 3. ?target? 4. ?sears? 5. ?best buy?

These are people who likely have done their research and are now looking for physical/local stores to buy what it is they want. This is striking because as much as the Internet is fueling the growth of e-commerce, it's driving offline shopping behavior. While this may be somewhat ?counterintuitive? for many people, this is the dominant shopping paradigm for the foreseeable future: online shopping, offline buying.

I've written a bit more about this on my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 10:32 AM | Permalink

May 24, 2006

Microsoft Talks Shopping

Last week I briefly introduced three of Microsoft's e-commerce initiatives: MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping, and Windows Live Product Search. This week I talked with Jim Barr, GM of Microsoft's Shopping and Marketplaces group for a little more insight.

Here's an excerpt: “Search is very important. Half of the shopping starts in search. 15-25% of all searches go to a shopping site. MSN search will not win unless we are good at commerce search. That’s a strong reason why we invested.”

“Windows Live Product Search goes on the presumption that the audience wants to see as much selection as possible. We crawl the web for everything out there. We’re starting with a philosophy that people should be able to search for tail items.”

“Eventually we want to apply as many ways to go from a long list of what’s available to a short list of what’s right for you. We have our goals in mind [to match buyers and sellers] and we want to do what’s right for users.”

Read more at ComparisonEngines.

Posted by Brian Smith at 8:57 AM | Permalink

May 19, 2006

Guide To Microsoft's Many Shopping Search Sites

This is a long overdue post to clear up confusion around Microsoft's multiple shopping sites which include MSN Shopping, Windows Live Shopping Beta, and Windows Live Product Search Beta. The Marketplaces & Shopping team at Microsoft also runs Windows Marketplace and Windows Live Expo but in this post, I'm just covering the general ecommerce initiatives.

MSN Shopping = Microsoft's core shopping comparison engine. MSN Shopping covers over 7,000 merchants and 33 million products. The beauty of a shopping comparison engine like MSN Shopping is in its ability to normalize product pages - put simply, item clustering (I'm borrowing that term from Imran Aziz, Lead Program Manager Windows Live Product Search Beta), the ability to put all merchant offers for a particular product on a single page. MSN Shopping works off of very structured product data provided by Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.

Windows Live Shopping = The Web 2.0 version of MSN Shopping. Windows Live Shopping does not work with FireFox, although that will be taken care of soon. As MSN Shopping Program Manager Ian McAllister wrote on his blog, "[this] was arguably the first experience within the Shopping team in developing a truly loosely-coupled service. It prompted what you might call a services tidal wave within our team that pre-dated Ray Ozzie's mail by a few months. Literally three-quarters of the development team went off and worked on a host of different services using the agile method and for the most part, operating independently of the other teams. The cornerstone of our web service platform is the set of core shopping web services that expose the product catalog, attribute refinements, compare and other functionality. Other services include ratings & reviews, wish list and guides."

This is an incredible improvement over MSN Shopping. Great user interface, cool features and tools. Windows Live Shopping really puts the consumer first and is an exciting example of the new types of services Microsoft is developing

Windows Live Product Search = Microsoft's shopping search engine. A shopping search engine differs from a shopping comparison engine in that it does not depend on merchants submitting data feeds, but rather crawls the web for merchants. Because of this, Windows Live Product Search covers over 100,000 merchants (a lot more than the 7,000 or so covered on MSN Shopping and Windows Live Shopping). A comprehensive experience is a great start, but I think we're too early in the game to understand the implication of this new search offering.

While there are obviously big improvements in comprehensiveness, Windows Live Product Search users will notice that there aren't normalized product pages (item clustering) in the traditional shopping comparison engine sense and merchant reveiws are a no show. According to the Product Search blog, though, these features are on the way.

Posted by Brian Smith at 2:55 PM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Microsoft Launches Windows Live Shopping Beta

Microsoft announced Friday that they have launched Windows Live Shopping in beta, it only works on Internet Explorer for Windows. It runs on AJAX, making it Web 2.0 :), but you can drag and drop, share items with "friends," and review and create reviews.

Conducting a search on lcd tv brought up a very nice interface. Since I just bought one for my new home, I wanted to see what they had to offer. You can quickly (well, it doesn't run too quickly) narrow your search by screen size, aspect ratio, price range, brand and seller, all excellent filter options. After you filter your search, you can then sort by "best match," "popularity," "price," and "rating." In addition, they have this little slider where you can change the search results display from list view with or without pictures or simply picture view. You can also add products to your "shopping list" or to "compare list." They also have all the standards you would expect from a shopping search engine.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:59 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2006

Former DoubleClick Execs Launch ShopWiki, New Shopping Search Engine

Another shopping comparison engine!?! Yes, I understand your lack of enthusiasm, but more than a decade after the industry was born, there's still a lot of room for improvement. ShopWiki, a new shopping search engine founded by former DoubleClick executives, takes a different approach than the current breed of comparison engines to address some issues.

What issues? When I discuss the challenges shopping comparison engines face, these surface again and again:

• Comprehensiveness - If only 10,000 merchants are submitting data feeds, the shopping comparison engines are missing out on at least 90,000 merchants.  
• Price floors - This also plays into the comprehensiveness issue. By implementing artificial price floors, the shopping comparison engines restrict the number of products listed as low margin goods will not be listed.  
• Lack of loyalty/Poor user experience - Because many shopping comparison engines depend on paid traffic, they are set up to optimize revenue per user. Get 'em in. Get 'em out through a paid link.

ShopWiki is far from perfect and the service has a long long way to go, but it?s on the right path and is a long term threat to the established players who are not thinking seriously about crawling. More about this is covered in my Q&A with the founders of ShopWiki. See also ShopWiki Aims to Redefine Shopping Search from ClickZ.

Posted by Brian Smith at 11:03 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2006

Talking With Frucall, New Comparison Shopping Service For Your Phone

Frucall, a mobile shopping comparison service, launched in beta last week. There's already been some good coverage.

I've tested Frucall for books and electronics and found the system fairly easy to use (figuring out bar codes turned out to be the most difficult part of the process). More importantly, when I tested Frucall in a local BestBuy, the service consistently delivered competitive prices. I'm still waiting for a barcode scanner to attach to my phone (as I believe this product exists in Japan), but Frucall is a solid solution.

Following is my e-mail Q&A with Nasser Manesh, CTO of Frucall:

How many individual product SKUs are covered? "Right now we are covering Amazon's database, which is a few million items. See below for more details."

Where does the product database come from? Are you just working through Amazon's API? "The initial launch of the service was with Amazon only. Work is already under way to expand the search beyond Amazon, and take advantage of not only e-retailers such as Amazon, but comparison shopping engines. The goal is to provide the best possible online prices to the in-store shopper."

What is your relationship with Amazon? Is it a basic affiliate relationship? "We are an AWS (Amazon Web Services) developer, and the business relationship at this point is the basic affiliate relationship."

Is there a certain category that you focus on like Books or Digital Cameras? "The vision is to cover everything, and our software is designed to handle that. However since the initial focus is on UPC codes, our service in its current state is more helpful with books, CDs, DVDs and movies, games, and electronics because the shopper can easily spot the UPC and call us to perform the search."

Do you hope to develop your own database of merchants or will you partner with a shopping comparison engine? "We prefer to stay focused on our area of expertise, which is delivering information to the communication device of the user's choice. We are establishing partnerships with comparison engines to extend the reach of their data to the mobile shopper."

How do you plan to make money? Affiliate relationships? Advertising? "A combination of different channels. Both affiliate relationships and advertisement are in our plans, as well as other types of partnerships."

Is this just a test program to prove Millenigence CBU's technology? "No, this is not a test program. Millenigence is fully committed to making Frucall the number one brand for mobile comparison shopping."

Are there other companies doing this? "There are a few other companies or experiments with services that may seem similar to Frucall, but Millenigence is the only company with a commercial focus and established partnerships for promoting mobile comparison shopping. Early on in the process of building the service, we filed patents and we continue to see Frucall as a key area of fast growth and high demand in our Consumer Business Unit."

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:39 PM | Permalink

April 12, 2006

Google Buys Dulance; To Open Russian Research Center

Sergei Burkov, Founder & CEO of Dulance will run Google's development center in Russia. This was first reported by TechWorld yesterday and brought to my attention by Googlist this morning.

I asked Sergei if Dulance was acquired by Google, and he forwarded me to Google's PR department which just confirmed the acquisition.

To provide some context to the acquisition, Google's shopping comparison engine, Froogle, originally started out as a crawler but switched to taking data feeds fairly early on. Because the service is completely free, Froogle probably has around 50,000 data feeds (no confirmation), although the quality of those feeds isn't always that great.

For comparison, many of the leading shopping comparison engines (by traffic) only have 5,000 - 10,000 data feeds, so I've argued for a while that these comparison engines are not truly comprehensive and therefore don't always provide a valuable user experience. In fact, some of the leading shopping comparison engines rely on Google AdSense ads to supplement search results.

Dulance was the first of a new breed of shopping search engine which was based on crawling technology. Today there are a number of these engines inclduding Pronto, FatLens, and ShopWiki.

When I've had time to digest the news and do more research, I'll update you with how Google might use Dulance. In the meantime, here's the official Google press release:

Monday April 10th 2006 ? Moscow: Google announced today that it is to open a research and development centre in Russia later this year as part of its ongoing investment in Europe.

The centre will be based in Moscow and run by Sergei Burkov Ph.D. Dr. Burkov is a former research physicist who has worked at both Cornell and the University of Wisconsin. In addition he co-founded three companies, Bilbo Innovations (computer pedals, distributed through Fry's Electronics), Invincible Data Systems (acquired by VASCO Data Security) and Dulance.

Google plans to use Russia?s phenomenal engineering talent to help develop great new products both for the Russian market and globally. According to the Russian Software Developers Association (RUSSOFT) Russia has the third highest number of scientists and engineers per head of any country in the world. Google also hopes to establish long-term partnerships leading with Russian institutes and universities.

Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President Engineering and Research at Google said: "It?s great to have Sergei on board. Technology is at the heart of everything we do at Google - we?re looking forward to working with our new Moscow team to develop great products for Russian users?.

Google's Russian R&D centre is the latest addition to a growing number of global engineering offices, which include the UK, Israel, Norway, Tokyo, Japan, Zurich, Switzerland, India and America (New York, Santa Monica, California, Kirkland, Washington and Mountain View).

Posted by Brian Smith at 12:27 PM | Permalink

April 7, 2006

E-consultancy UK Shopping Comparison Engine Buying Guide

Linus Gregoriadis of E-consultancy recently published a shopping comparison engine buyer's guide focusing for the UK market. E-consultancy estimates that shopping comparison engines made between £120m and £140m in UK revenue during 2005.

One of the most telling facts testifying to the popularity of shopping comparison engines is comScore UK's data which reveals that "shopping comparison engine sites now have 49% reach within the UK online population."

Linus dedicates an entire section to using the comparison engines effectively, and I was particularly interested in the optimization techniques for merchants advertising on the shopping comparison engines. He covers the importance of tracking, deep linking, and the tendency of marketers to abandon the marketing channel prematurely. See my comments at ComparisonEngines.com.

Linus also does a SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) Analysis and covers the following topics: Market Consolidation, Reliance on Google, and Increased Merchant Understanding of Comparison Engine ROI.

Posted by Brian Smith at 12:29 PM | Permalink

March 30, 2006

Dulance Dies, While StreetPrices Has Cool Product Tree View

Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com reports that the newish Dulance shopping search engine seems to be gone. I certainly can't reach it at Dulance.com. Meanwhile, Autumn Looijen over at StreetPrices reaches out for a bit of link love for her shopping search engine, which she says has been around since 1997. OK, I'll bite. A quickie search for treo 650 looks OK and nice that I can narrow to a specific category, such as the Treo as cell phone rather than Treo accessories. Narrow in, and you can even see little price charts over time. But what drove me over the edge to give it a mention was tree view. Look at how you can see everything related to the Treo 650 in this example. Nice!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:30 PM | Permalink

March 14, 2006

Getting Relisted In The Shopping Search Engines Too Easy?

Thomas Hawk has been following an online retailer named PriceRitePhoto that has been allegedly ripping off its customers. Thomas reports that even though PriceRitePhoto has been delisted after its abusive bait and switch tactics, it has been re-listed at both Yahoo Shopping, PriceGrabber and MSN Shopping. Thomas is upset with these shopping search engines for not screening past fraudulent retailers more closely. He notes that he has received a response from Yahoo that they will remove this retailer once again for being in "violation of Yahoo's Terms of Service." He has not heard from PriceGrabber or MSN as of yet.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:54 AM | Permalink

January 30, 2006

New Study Reports that Search Sites Provides Twice the Conversion Rate When Compared With Other Acquisition Sources

The Dow Jones story: Search Sites Better At Getting Shoppers To Buy: Study, reports on new research from WebSideStory that shows search engines (both paid and organic listings) provide more than twice the conversion rates than other forms of Internet advertising and marketing.

However, direct navigation offered the highest conversion rate. The sites used in the study cover five product categories.

From the article: The study defines conversion rate as the percentage of visitors to a site who view an ad or clicking on a search result and purchase a product or service.

Numbers

Search Search Sites had a conversion rate of 2.3%, meaning that for every 100 consumers clicking on a search result or advertisement, 2.3 people made a purchase.

Other Forms of Internet Marketing Banner ads, affiliate marketing links, comparison shopping search sites* and other online marketing efforts had a conversion rate of 0.96%.

* Note, that shopping engines are not considered in the main search category.

Search Bypass: Direct Navigation/Bookmarks Direct to a company's web site (including via a bookmark) offered a conversion rate of 4.23%.

Where did the data come from: The study collected data from Web sites that sell apparel, toys, electronics, sporting goods and leisure products. Among the most successful were toy sites. When reached through a search engine, they had a conversion rate of 4.85% while Web sites selling computers and electronics had a conversion rate of 1.35%, the study found.

The sites used in the study generate more than $3 billion in annual sales online in five categories listed above.

This news release from WebSideStory has more including precise definitions for each category.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:26 PM | Permalink

January 29, 2006

Work To Begin Next Month on Developing a Standard For Shopping and Comparison Search Product Descriptions

A DMNews.com article: Retailers, Engines Want Standard for Product Description, discusses a session at Shop.org's FirstLook 2006 event where representatives from Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Become, and Shop.com, along with several retailers and trade groups, about the need to develop, "a common standard for describing products for online SKU-based advertising and comparison shopping."

Retailers and engines shared their frustration at the lack of a common platform to describe products and receive advertising reports, [Alan] Rimm-Kaufman said. He noted that "organizations with widely different interests all agreed that the current situation was far from good and that an industry standard would help greatly." Participants agreed to work on an industry standard for describing products online using the expertise and process of the Association for Retail Technology Standards, he said. The group plans to meet Feb. 27 in Menlo Park, CA, to begin work on a spec.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:19 PM | Permalink

January 10, 2006

IAC/InterActive Debuts Comparison Shopping Search Service Named Pronto

Mr. Comparison Shopping himself, Brian Smith, posts that IAC/InterActive (the company that owns Ask Jeeves, Citysearch, Ticketmaster, etc.) has just released a comparison shopping service Pronto. Look for a review Brian's site shortly.

We will also plan to give it a go. Btw, I used the word service instead of site because Pronto requires the user to download a 2MB app. At the moment, it's IE only available for Windows 2000 or higher. You can learn more about Pronto here and the service itself via these FAQ's.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:39 PM | Permalink

January 3, 2006

Sources for Product Reviews Online

On Christmas Day, the New York Times offered a look at several services that allow end users to supply and share reviews of different projects. Well-known services like Consumer Reports and Consumer Guide are mentioned. Other sources like CNET, Yahoo, Amazon.com, and epinions are also included. Additionally, a couple of other new and potentially useful services got some ink:

+ DontbyJunk and + ConsumerSearch.com

I've used ConsumerSearch several times and found it very useful. What makes these services different?

...by providing a distillation or meta-analysis of all reviews for various products posted on the Web and deemed credible by the sites' editors. Whereas Dontbuyjunk, introduced three months ago, is still evolving, ConsumerSearch went online in 2000 and is more comprehensive in the number and kinds of products it covers as well as the number of sources it uses to make recommendations. Moreover, ConsumerSearch summarizes its findings in easy-to-read tables. Both sites accept advertising and are free.

Finally, Angie's List, a service that offeres local area reviews (for 27 metropolitan areas) is mentioned. This fee-based service offers a database of, "contractor, from plumbers to clowns who perform at birthday parties."

I plan to take a closer look at Dontbyjunk, ConsumerSearch, and Angie's List, in the near future.

One other source for consumer electronics product reviews worth mentioning. SmartSort from Yahoo Shopping allows users to create personalized lists of useful products by answering questions and moving sliders. The reviews themselves are licensed from PC World magazine. Very cool, IMHO.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:58 PM | Permalink

December 17, 2005

New Look for MSN Shopping Price Comparison Pages

MSN Shopping has been mentioned in several posts over the past few months.

Yesterday, Mike Gordon, Lead Product Manager, blogged about enhancements to price information pages and a some minor tweaks to the user interface.

Gordon writes: This page allows MSN Shopping customers to compare all the offers for standard products like consumer electronics, books and movies. Instead of sorting offers purely by price, the page now sorts offers by condition first, then price. Offers for new items are listed first, sorted by price; then refurbished items, sorted by price; then used items, sorted by price; and lastly, items where the seller did not specify condition.

Our consumer testing shows that most MSN Shopping users prefer to shop for new goods, though many are interested in being able to compare prices for refurbished and used items as well. They can do both on our new page, without having to check a separate page for refurbished or used items, as many of our competitors require.

Recent posts about MSN Shopping include: + Millions of eBay Items Now Searchable on MSN Shopping + MSN Shopping Receives Upgrade Down Under + MSN Shopping Adds Search Refinements for Hundreds of Product Categories

Posted by Gary Price at 4:32 PM | Permalink

December 14, 2005

Experian Parent Buys PriceGrabber For $485 Million

Well, that didn't take long. Little more than a month after PriceGrabber CEO Kamran Pourzanjani told me that his company would "continue to do well as a stand-alone company," retail and financial services company GUS PLC announced today that it has bought PriceGrabber.com for $485 million.

GUS may not be a familiar name, but its subsidiaries include Experian (credit reports), and U.K. retailers Argos and Homebase. Earlier this year GUS purchased loan-lead site LowerMyBills.com for $330 million.

This is the third major shopping and comparison search engine acquisition this year. In June, eBay acquired Shopping.com for $625 million, and a week later Shopzilla agreed to be acquired by media company E.W. Scripps for $525 million.

Who's next?

When I was preparing my annual shopping search roundup I asked Stephen Imbler, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of NexTag whether NexTag was on the market. He told me that "our intent is to be a large successful internet company," and that a buyout or IPO was one of the "options" the company was considering.

Become.com is also a likely target. Co-founders Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yung are old hands at the build and sell game. The pair sold one of the first shopping search engines, MySimon to C|Net in January 2000 for $700 million. Yun created the Wisenut search engine and sold it to Looksmart in April 2002 in an all stock deal valued at just under $10 million at the time.

Smarter.com is another possibility. Headed by a group of ex-Overture execs, the company has been profitable since the get-go, according to Smarter.com co-founder Talmadge O'Neill. The company is also moving aggressively to build up a presence in Japan and China, one of the fastest growing online markets in the world.

Postscript From Gary: Experian's interactive division also owns LowermyBills.com, MetaReward, Affiliate Fuel, ClassesUSA.com and Experian Consumer Direct. Orange Country, CA based PriceGrabber maintains its own site and also powers shopping search on many other sites including Ask Jeeves, Comcast's web portal, and others. It also has an agreement with MSN. PriceGrabber offers products and services from about 9000 merchants.

PriceGrabber was formed in 1999 and employs 140 people.

More in this Bloomberg report and the official press release. More about Experian Information Services itself on this overview page from Hoover's.

2005 has been a "year of consolidation" in the shopping search space as Chris recently pointed out in : Shopping Search Week 2005. This article does a fantastic job of reviewing the year and includes details abouts eBay's purchase of Shopping.com and Shopzilla's acquisition by E.W. Scripps.

Since Chris wrote this article another development I see as important in shopping search is the recent inclusion of eBay items into the MSN Shopping database. As noted earlier, MSN has a partnership agreement to provide contnet to PriceGrabber.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:24 AM | Permalink

December 12, 2005

New Google Catalogs Database Now Live

That was fast. Via Google Blogoscoped word that Google Catalogs, you know, the one that went offline last week, is now back online. The wonderful Phillip L. even has a screen cap that shows the new and old interfaces.

My post from last week has a bit on the history of Google Catalogs and how the database grew stale over time.

At one point, Google Catalogs contained about 6,600 catalogs. The new Google Catalogs site does not list the amount of catalogs listed in the new database. The advanced search interface remains the same as what was available before the retooling. However, I did notice that at one time the advanced interface offered a SafeSearch filter that you could use on a per search basis. Here's a screen cap from 2004 that illustrates what I'm talking about. The current advanced interface does not offer this search option.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:06 PM | Permalink

December 3, 2005

Millions of eBay Items Now Searchable on MSN Shopping

Just in time for the holiday shopping season and interesting move from MS. You can now search MSN Shopping and find items up for auction or for sale on eBay and still get access to many of the refinements available on the actual eBay site.

The MSN Shopping Insider blog reports that items listed on eBay are now directly searchable via MSN Shopping. According to the post, you'll find both auction items and fixed priced items ready for immediate sale.

From the blog post: Inventory on eBay is constantly changing and in order to bring our consumers the freshest catalog of choices possible, we parse, load, classify and match the tens of millions of eBay items on a daily basis. We have invested in building out our software platform to handle such high churn workloads and have expanded our server infrastructure to efficiently and quickly ingest the inventory available on eBay, along with the catalogs of our existing merchants and aggregators. All told, we sift through hundreds of millions of items every day.

The post goes on to mention that along with the actual items, search refinements such as "auction sort" and the ability to see the number of auctions available for a specific item. The blog post has a screen cap.

Here's another MSN/eBay search. Item details provided on an MSN Shopping page. After clicking on the desired item the searcher is then sent to the specific item entry on the eBay site.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:21 AM | Permalink

December 2, 2005

On Craigslist, Job Loses at Mainstream News Orgamizations, and Citizen Journalism

The San Franscisco Weekly reports in the article Craig$list.com, that the very popular classified ad site, its founder calls it an online marketplace "like a fleamarket," is beginning to cause layoffs at well-known and established news organizations. The story offers all sorts of interesting facts. For example, Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, still uses text-based Pine as his email program. Probably not a bad idea. (-:

Seriously, the article includes plenty of good reading. Here are a few passages from the nine page article.

Newmark now suffers from a moral dilemma: He feels guilty about helping cause job losses and poorer-quality papers, but he's excited to accelerate the decline of the big, bad mainstream media. He seems determined to remedy his sins against the media by changing it for the better, lending his name and dollars to a citizen journalism movement populated by J-school professors, idealistic techno-futurists, and so-called citizen journalists. The hardest-hit publications are in the Bay Area, which accounts for about one-quarter of Craigslist's traffic. The Chronicle and its competitors lose more than $50 million per year because of job ads that have migrated to Craigslist, according to a 2004 report by Bob Cauthorn, the former vice president of digital media at Chronicle Web site SFGate.com, who is now working on his own media venture, City Tools. The San Jose Mercury News alone misses out on $12 million annually in employment ad revenue because of Craigslist, according to recent estimates by Lou Alexander... While the failings of the modern newspaper industry are many, if Craigslist wasn't costing them big bucks, it's unlikely that publishers would have created a host of Craigslist-copycat sites. BackPage, the mostly free classifieds site launched last year by SF Weekly's corporate parent, New Times, is only slightly more commercial than Craigslist, offering additional paid services that place an ad higher in the listings or print it in the paper. While it stopped the bleeding of classifieds from New Times papers, Senior Vice President Scott Spear admits that BackPage has little chance of overtaking Craigslist in its established cities. Nationally, BackPage has 1.8 million visitors per month, less than the number Craigslist attracts in the Bay Area alone. To Craigslist's executives, the consequences for competitors and other industries aren't important. Their choices are justified, they believe, by what the user community asks for. Every month, 10 million people worldwide click through 3 billion pages of Craigslist.

A good read not only on Craigslist but also its founder and ciizen journalism in general. Btw, OurMedia, Wikipedia, and Korea's OhMyNews are also mentioned.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:59 PM | Permalink

December 1, 2005

Shopping Search Week Wrapup

Today's SearchDay article, New Players in Shopping and Comparison Search, is the last instalment of my annual shopping and comparison search roundup. The first two articles in the series are Shopping Search Week 2005 and What's New in Shopping Search 2005.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 4:25 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2005

Shopping Search: The Year in Review

Today's SearchDay article, What's New in Shopping Search 2005, continues my annual look at this specialized search space. This second installment of Shopping Search Week 2005 features a rundown of key changes and new services offered by the major players in the comparison and shopping search arenas. Part one of the series is Shopping Search Week 2005.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:20 AM | Permalink

November 29, 2005

Survey: 8 of 10 Holiday Shoppers Plan to Buy Online

To go along with "Shopping Search Week" in SearchDay, InternetRetailer.com has some new numbers from a Harris Interactive survey that was commissioned by Yahoo Small Business in the article: Eight out of 10 holiday shoppers plan to buy gifts online, survey finds.

Key Findings: + Some 30% of those surveyed said they would do at least half of their holiday shopping online. + About two-thirds of respondents identified online specialty or nice retailers as the ?best places? to shop for unusual or hard-to-find gifts.

In other findings, a high percentage of shoppers identified convenient hours (75%), avoiding crowded parking lots (68%) and the ability to locate hard-to-find or unusual gifts (60%) as the reason they planned to shop for holiday gifts online. A smaller percentage, 36%, identified lower prices as a reason to shop online for holiday gifts.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:42 PM | Permalink

The State of Shopping Search, 2005

Today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search Week 2005, kicks off my annual review of the comparison shopping search space, looking at changes over the past year, discussing traffic stats and trends and more. Later in the week I'll take a detailed look at the leaders in the space, as well as promising newcomers that will likely have an impact over the course of the coming year.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:42 AM | Permalink

November 22, 2005

Search Marketing Working for Comparison Shopping Sites

The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and aggressive search marketing on the part of comparison shopping sites is paying off. Google and Yahoo! Search sent 25 percent more visits to the ten leading shopping comparison sites versus last year (week ending November 19, 2005 versus the week ending November 20, 2004), according to Hitwise.

U.S visits to retail websites accounted for 9.32 percent of all visits to the Internet, last week, and the top growing retail categories were:

Flowers and Gifts (up 13.4%); Ticketing (up 11.5%); Department Stores (up 10.5%); Rewards and Directories (up 9.7%) and Appliances and Electronics (up 8.3%).

Other data from Hitwise:

Retail (9.32 percent) was the second most popular online category after Adult (16.8%). Retail is again ahead of Email sites (8.9 percent).

The leading product-related search terms driving traffic to retail Web sites were "ipod," "furniture," "auto parts," "lingerie," "tires," "toys," "mp3 players," "xbox 360," "flowers" and "ipod mini."

Hitwise offers more holiday related stats over on the Hitwise Intelligence blog.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:01 PM | Permalink

Froogle Offers Local Shopping Feature

Google's Froogle shopping search engine added a new feature to let people find products and services for sale in bricks-and-mortar stores near locations they designate.

For example, if you wanted to find all the stores selling cameras near Newport Beach, California, a search for cameras newport beach or cameras 92663 brings back matching results, both in a list and plotted on a map. You can also search just for cameras, then enter a ZIP code, city or state into a second search box that will appear.

How is this different from just doing a search on Google Local? Well, you can compare. Here's cameras 92663 on Google Local. You'll see that camera stores are listed in Google Local, while Froogle lists individual cameras for sale in various locations.

Another example is a search for ipod video 92663. In that case, Froogle shows you that several CompUSA stores have it in stock. A quick drive, and it would be in your hands if you needed it fast. In contrast, the same search on Google Local does poorly, bringing back two Apple Stores that probably have the item in stock but mostly a lot of places that won't, such as The Friends Of The Newport Beach Library.

Google's Shopping Service to List User's Local Stores from the New York Times and Google unveils tool to map shopping trips from the Associated Press say the data comes from a third-party inventory database that Google won't name. Google has long accepted feeds from merchants and others for Froogle, so it's likely making use of multiple sources to compile the data. Both stories cover that Google hopes the new Google Base service will also help add this type of data into Froogle in the future.

Comparison Engines notes that the feature CNET already offers a Local Stores search as part of its CNET Shopper service. Sadly, a search for ipod video 92663 brought up no matches, nor did I have much luck coming up with any product that would show me a Local Stores tab in addition to the Online Stores tab as you see in this example.

Postscript from Gary: Two other online shopping databases also allow you to search by location/Zip Code. First, Cairo.com, the shopping search engine allows the user to enter a location/Zip and a product type of category and find where products are available locally. For example, this search for Cameras 20901 found a number of hits for stores near my home (you can narrow by a radius). The results appear to come from primarily large retailers (Target, Rite Aid, Circuit City, etc.). One-click provides a map and directions to the store. Another useful feature from Cairo is their "Sales Alert" feature that will notify you by email if/when the price of a specific product is reduced. Cairo also offers a "price match tracker" to learn if another store is selling the item for a lower price. Btw, the Cairo datatbase is also completely browsable.

Second, ShopLocal.com offers much the same with mostly items from prirmarily large national stores but I also spotted a few regional and local merchants. ShopLocal also provides price alerts and does offer some online shopping options. For example, you can quickly determine the online price versus going to the store and purchase price.

Postscript 2 From Gary: It's also worth noting that Amazon.com offers an option to order selected books online and then and then pick the book up at a nearby brick and mortar bookstore. For example, a search for John's "The Search" illustrates this option.

The same is true for electronics. For example, I can order this Apple 30GB Color iPod from Circuit City online and then go pick it up today at a nearby Circuit City location.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:56 AM | Permalink

November 15, 2005

Yahoo Debuts the Shoposphere

Traditionally, shopping search has revolved around providing product information and expert reviews, occasionally supplemented by reviews from customers that are often of dubious value. Yahoo is extending shopping search today by adding a number of new community-oriented tools that allow users to search for other user's product recommendations, as well as comment on them and rate them, adding a new layer of information to the mix. It's an interesting approach, and one that's likely to be quite popular in the shopping search arena. More in today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Personalizes Shopping, Adds Community Features.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2005

Shopzilla Comes to the UK

I guess one shopping search post deserves another. Netimperative reports that Shopzilla has just expanded into the UK. The company also offers shopping databases in France and Germany.

Shopzilla was purchased by E.W. Scripps earlier this year for $525 million.

Brian Smith from ComparisonEngines.com posted this interview with Farhad Mohit, Chairman and Chief Product Officer of Shopzilla, in August.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:09 PM | Permalink

Shopping Engine Smarter.com Launches in China and Japan

We've posted that shopping engine, Smarter.com, would be moving into the Chinese and Japanese markets with new shopping engine services.

Today is the official launch of both services More from News.com and this news release.

From the news release: The Japanese and Chinese comparison shopping search sites are quite different reflecting the different stages of e-commerce development in both countries. In Japan, Smarter.co.jp offers consumers the opportunity to shop and compare products from leading Japanese retailers in the following categories: fashion and apparel, baby and maternity, home and garden, food and drinks, pet supplies, musical instruments, consumer electronics and appliances, and sporting goods. In China, Smarter.com.cn launches with what is commonly referred to in China as 3C channels (computers, consumer electronics and communications) from select tier 1 retailers.

If you're interested in hearing from the founders of Smarter.com, check out these two interviews (one print, one video) with company co-founders Talmadge O'Neill and Harry Tsao.

Smarter.com also powers the shopping database on Snap.com.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:38 AM | Permalink

November 10, 2005

PC Magazine Reviews Six Comparison Shopping Sites, PriceGrabber Gets Top Honors

In a PC Magazine review of six comparison shopping sites titled: Price-Comparison Sites Strive to Save You Time and Money, Rick Broida takes a look at:

+ Become.com + mySimon + PriceGrabber.com + Shopping.com + Smarter.com + Shopzilla Broida's article also includes a look at Buy.com, Amazon.com, and eBay. Interestingly (maybe another article?) no mentions of Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, and/or MSN Shopping. Bottom Line? PriceGrabber grabs the editors' pick. Btw, PriceGrabber also powers "product" search on Ask Jeeves. Finally, if you follow the shopping search engine scene, make sure to visit Brian Smith's, ComparisonEngines.com blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:49 PM | Permalink

November 3, 2005

Pricegrabber Survey Says No Holiday Blues This Year

Pricegrabber has released the results of a holiday shopping survey, and despite consumer gloom reported elsewhere, it looks like online retailers are going to have a merry holiday season.

93 percent of respondents agreed that they expect to shop and buy more online this year than last year. The survey found that 46 percent of respondents will shop online more this holiday compared to previous years specifically because of higher gasoline prices.

Online shoppers also expect to dedicate high percentages of their holiday buying online, saying they expect to do 50 percent of their shopping online.

More details in the press release.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:08 PM | Permalink

November 1, 2005

Verizon SuperPages.com Adds Features

Verizon announced today that SuperPages.com now includes user reviews that lets searchers rate the more than 18 million local businesses, a new comparison shopping tool, and access to coupons and circulars from a particular local area.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:27 PM | Permalink

October 25, 2005

Shopping Search Engines and Consumer Trust

Shopping search engines pioneered the idea of displaying an online merchant's reputation based on ratings provided by shoppers who actually bought products from a merchant. But how trustworthy are these reputation rankings? How do the shopping search engines prevent merchants from gaming their reviews, or other merchants slamming their competitors? In today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search and Merchant Reputations, guest writer Shari Thurow reports on a recent Search Engine Strategies panel that focused on these issues.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:20 AM | Permalink

October 13, 2005

Smarter.com Co-Founder Does Video Interview

Those of you who follow shopping search closely might like to take a look at this video interview with, Talmadge O'Neill, one of the co-founders of Smarter.com. The interview includes a brief discussion of Smarter's SMS search tool. O'Neill and the other Smarter.com co-founder Harry Tsao, were also interviewed this summer by Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:04 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

Shopping Engine Become.com Plans Move Into Japanese Market

Word in this Red Herring report that Michael Yang and the shopping research/comparison shopping engine, Become.com has plans to expanded into the Japanese search marketplace. The move is in partnership with Japanese information technology services firm, Transcosmos.

He [Yang] said his company chose to enter Asia through Japan because it was a bigger market than China. However, he said that Become also has plans to expand in China, but did not specify a time frame....Become Japan will be headquartered in Tokyo, and will launch with a staff of 15 in a 2,000-square-foot office.

Recently, Smarter.com, also in the shopping search space, announced plans to expand their presence in the Chinese marketplace. Alan Wallace from Smarter.com also alerts me to the fact that Smarter.com has been working in the Japanese marketplace for about six months.

More in the article: Become Expands in Japan.

For more about Become.com's offerings, see the SearchDay article: Become.com Offers Comparison Shopping.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:29 PM | Permalink

September 29, 2005

MSN Shopping Adds Search Refinements for Hundreds of Product Categories

Just up on the MSN Shopping Insider is a post about some new and useful features that have gone live at MSN Shopping. Now, it's possible to focus and refine a shopping search using attributes that are specific to the product category your searching in. This has been possible with MSN Shopping in the past with categories like televisions and computers but as of today these types of refinements are available in more than 300 categories. For example, if you're searching for flowers, you can now focus your flower search by type (roses, lillies, etc), arrangement type (bouquet, vase, planter, etc.) flower color, and seller. Of course, you can also focus by price range. If you're searching for a diamonds, you can refine by color, carat, clarity, cut and price. Little to no learning curve to use these refinements. A good example of keeping it simple.

I didn't check all 300 categories (-:, but I did look at other shopping engines to see what refinements they offer shopping for diamonds.

+ Shopzilla also allows to refine by stone shape, carat, cut, color, clarity, and price range. + Shopping.com allows a searcher to refine a search for diamonds by clarity, carat, and price. Very similar to MSN Shopping. + PriceGrabber offers a carat refinement. + Yahoo Shopping, refine by price. + Become.com, refine by price. + Froogle, refine by price and store

Posted by Gary Price at 8:31 PM | Permalink

September 19, 2005

FatLens Will Expand Shopping Search Offerings

More shopping search news to report. FatLens, the meta search service that currently allows the searcher to simultaneously query several databases that offer tickets (concerts, plays, games, etc.) for sale will soon expand into several new product categories. According to this news release, FatLens will offer shopping search for six new product categories in time for the 2005 holiday season. The new product categories are:

• Clothing
• Accessories
• Shoes
• Luggage
• Jewelry
• Electronics

FatLens launched their ticket search service earlier this year.

You can read more about what FatLens plans to offer including info about their "merchant revenue approach" in the news release.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:18 AM | Permalink

September 16, 2005

Shopping.com's Merchant Account Center Offline for Six Days

Brian Smith from ComparisonEngines.com is not very happy with Shopping.com. Smith writes that beginning today Shopping.com's merchant account center will be unavailable for six days. Yes, Brian did get one email notifying him of the extended down time but thinks (correcly, I might add) that not allowing customers to have a method to make changes to their account for almost a week is "absurd" and "poor customer service."

Smith writes: According to the current notification on the site, no changes can be made to my account over the next 6 days which means that merchants are going to get charged for clicks they might not want. This is poor customer service, and I expect to be credited for any clicks over the next 6 days.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:31 PM | Permalink

September 14, 2005

Snap.com Offers Shopping Search Powered by Smarter.com

Word in this news release that Idealab's Snap.com has launched a shopping search engine that's powered with results from Smarter.com, an engine that I've mentioned several times on the blog. Smarter.com is led by by former Overture employees Talmadge O'Neill and Harry Tsao while GoTo.com/Overture founder, Bill Gross, is at the Snap.com helm.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:48 PM | Permalink

September 13, 2005

Yahoo Shopping Goes Mobile

Yahoo has just released a mobile version of Yahoo Shopping. Details and instructions here. The mobile version of Yahoo Shopping will work on mobile phones/devices with a WAP 2.0 enabled browser that has access to one of the following networks: Cingular–Orange, Cingular–Blue (formerly AT&T Wireless), Verizon, Sprint, Nextel, and T–Mobile.

Along with the new (beta) mobile version Yahoo Shopping, the folks in Sunnyvale have also added a feature to the web version of Yahoo Shopping that allows the searcher to send product info directly to their phone (via SMS, text message). Look for the "Send to Phone" link on "product pages." Yahoo also offers the send-to-phone feature for Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Local.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:50 PM | Permalink

September 12, 2005

Let's Talk Froogle: Q&A With Marketing Manager Brian Smith, editor of ComparisonEngines.com, has just posted a brief Q&A interview with Debbie Jaffe, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Google, about Froogle. You'll learn about the history of the service, what Jaffee believes are the services strengths, and the user experience. Jaffe also tells Brian that Google hires, "hire athletes, not shortstops."

Posted by Gary Price at 11:06 AM | Permalink

August 25, 2005

Execs from SideStep and PriceRunner Interviewed

After taking a week to relax, Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com is back posting interviews with leaders from comparison shopping services. This week, Brian has posted interviews with Phil Carpenter, VP of Corporate Marketing, at SideStep (a travel comparison engine) and Martin Anderson from PriceRunner.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

August 18, 2005

Shopzilla Chairman Chats Shopping Search

Brian Smith over at ComparisonEngines.com is continuing his series of interviews with shopping engines execs. This time around, Brian chats with Farhad Mohit, the Chairman and Chief Product Officer of Shopzilla.

Last week, Brian published an interview with the co-founders of Smarter.com

Posted by Gary Price at 1:57 PM | Permalink

August 17, 2005

Google Enhances Mobile Version of Froogle, Launches Service in the UK

Google engineer, Josh Redstone, posts to the Google Blog that they've made some improvements to the mobile web version of Froogle including the ability to sort results by price. Additionally, a mobile web version of Froogle is now available for the UK. If you don't have a mobile browser that can access the new service, Froogle is also available via SMS in the US and UK.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:15 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2005

Preparing Feeds for Inclusion in Become.com Database

Part 2 of Shari Thurow's interview with Jonathan Glick from shopping research and comparison engine, Become.com, is now online. This time around the interview focuses on what the webmaster can do to prepare feeds of product listings for inclusion in the Become.com database. Like I said last time, this is a must-read interview for anyone interested in shopping search. Part 1 of the interview is accessible here.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:22 PM | Permalink

August 11, 2005

A Conversation With the Co-Founders of Smarter.com

I recently blogged that comparison shopping engine, Smarter.com, will soon be moving into China's search marketplace. Today, Brian Smith from ComparisonEngines.com, has posted an interview that covers a variety of topics (General search engines vs. shopping comparison engine, international expansion, etc.) with Smarter.com co-founders, Harry Tsao and Talmadge O’Neill. Btw, Smarter.com also plays in the SMS search space here in the US.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:33 PM | Permalink

August 4, 2005

How Will eBay Utilize Shopping.com?

About a week ago, eBay shareholders approved the company's acquistion of shopping comparison engine, Shopping.com.

The deal is set to close at the end of the month. Since the acquisition was announced in June, we've heard very little about how eBay will utilize Shopping.com. The IDG News service article: Few details in eBay's Shopping.com plans, offers a few bits of speculation about what might develop.

Although each organization could gain by integrating services from the other, so far eBay is only committing to one area of integration: Once the deal is finalized, some eBay listings will begin appearing on Shopping.com...."The vision we have is to give our sellers who are evolving in that direction access to that new channel for selling and for possibly including eBay listings within the product selection already available on Shopping.com. How we're going to do that... we haven't announced," said Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, in an interview. "Nothing like that has been decided."

Posted by Gary Price at 3:53 PM | Permalink

August 3, 2005

Shopping Engine Smarter.com Will Launch in China

This news release from shopping engine, Smarter.com, points out that the company will launch a version of their service in China during Q4 2005.

Smarter.com's parent, MeziMedia, is lead by former Overture employees Talmadge O'Neill and Harry Tsao.

Smarter.com also powers shopping search at Snap.com and also provides SMS access to their database.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:16 PM | Permalink

August 1, 2005

Shari Thurow Chats Shopping Search with Become.com's Jon Glick

In the first part of a two part interview, Shari Thurow chats with search industry veteran (Yahoo, AltaVista) Jon Glick, presently the Senior Director for Product Search at shopping research and comparison shopping engine, Become.com.

If you're interested in shopping search and how Become.com works, must-read content here. The second part of Shari's interview (next week) will focus on optimizing a site for the Become.com crawler.

For more about Become.com see these SEW Blog posts:

• Become.com Integrates Product Research, Comparison Shopping
• Become.com Launches Product News Search
• Become.com Now Providing Dynamic Search Term Suggestions
• MySimon Founders Return for Encore

Posted by Gary Price at 2:10 PM | Permalink

July 27, 2005

Cairo.com Beats ShopLocal.com in WSJ Test of Local Shopping Engines

In today's Wall Street Journal (registration not required), Walt Mossberg reports recent test of two local shopping engines, Cairo.com and ShopLocal.com.

Which engine is better according to Mossberg?

Our tests yielded a clear winner: Cairo. In almost every case, its search results were better and more accurate than ShopLocal's, and it offered personalization and special features that ShopLocal couldn't match...Overall, Cairo is a smart Web site that makes it easy to compare prices at retail stores, and its added features that do some extra legwork for you take the hassle out of finding good sales. Until ShopLocal.com steps up and adds more personalization and accurate search results, the better Web site for deal comparisons is Cairo.com.

More about Cairo.com in this SEW Blog post from last October.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:11 PM | Permalink

July 19, 2005

A Chat with Rob Solomon from Yahoo Shopping

Brian Smith over at Comparison Engines has published a Q&A interview with Rob Solomon, Yahoo Shopping V.P.

From the interview:

Q: What Makes Yahoo! Shopping Different than the other Shopping Comparison Engines? ?Comprehensiveness in terms of the number of product offerings on Yahoo! Shopping and the number of merchants listed on Yahoo! Shopping. Over time there will be a decent gap that Yahoo and Google will create [with their shopping search engines] because of advanced crawling and search capabilities.?

A: ?Looking forward, there will be more focus on personalization and community. Yahoo has 350m users globally and 150m registered users. We?re making a big bet on community with services like Yahoo! 360. We?ll spend the next 2-4 yrs building out community features and it will factor into the shopping experience. Epinions was good. Ratings are pretty good. The next generation [shopping search] has to do with community features and more robust ratings and review. We will focus on bringing more content into the experience. In the past it?s been over-hyped and ended up scaring people, but there will be more and more personalization and customization within Yahoo Shopping!?

Posted by Gary Price at 3:32 PM | Permalink

Become.com Integrates Product Research, Comparison Shopping

As useful as specialized shopping search services are, most of them are focused primarily on comparison shopping, or helping you find the best deal for a product. This means you need to have a fairly clear idea of what you're looking for before they're very useful. Sure, most shopping sites help somewhat with the research process that occurs prior to active shopping, but in many cases you also need to turn to the web or other sources of information to really learn enough to make the best purchase decision.

Become.com, which launched last April as a shopping research engine, has added comparison shopping tools to the search results you get with its 3.2 billion page shopping search index. It's a powerful combination, making it easy to shift between product research and comparison shopping, all in one place. Today's SearchDay article, Become.com Offers Comparison Shopping, takes a closer look.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:22 AM | Permalink

July 15, 2005

MSN Shopping Beta Now Available

Brian Smith at Comparison Engines has posted news about today's official beta launch of MSN Shopping. Brian's post includes several comments from Chris Jolley, Group Programming Manager of MSN Shopping.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:06 PM | Permalink

July 6, 2005

Q&As, Q&As, Q&As On Search

It's Q&A madness out there. Below links to Q&As with a black hat on SEO, a recovering PR meister on search and public relations, an information research professional on search marketing, Bloglines, PriceGrabber, Digital Point and MSN Search to come.

• Interview of David Naylor at SEO Book covers Dave's life and times on the black hat side but also how for most webmasters, white hat is good enough.  
• Q+A with Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com at SEO Chat has Greg talking about the life and times of generating good public relations and countering bad PR via search.  
• Interview with Dr. Garcia (Orion) at SEOmoz talks with Dr. Edel Garcia about the life and times of looking at search marketing from an information retrieval background.  
• 5 Questions with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher at SearchViews talks with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher on the life and times of elevating blog search, wheterh news customization might make fragmented communities and three other questions.  
• Interview of Shawn Hogan of Digital Point Solutions at SEO Book has Digital Point founder Shawn Hogan on the life and times of developing tools for SEO and running a popular forum and link network.  
• PriceGrabber - It?s All About the User Experience from Comparison Engines has Ron La Pierre of PriceGrabber on the life and times of running PriceGrabber.  
• Ask Questions Directly to the MSN Search Development Team: No answers yet, but if you have questions for MSN Search, they're going to be reviewing and answering within this SEO Chat thread.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:02 PM | Permalink

July 5, 2005

Become.com Launches Product News Search

Become.com, the shopping vertical that offers a "focused" database containing product reviews and other buying information, (see SearchDay's positive review from April 2005) has launched a new service today that provides up-to-the minute news headlines about products and services found in the Become.com database.

Become.com's News Search provides information on new product offerings, safety warnings, product recalls, and a wide range of shopping-related content. The news search is conducted automatically every time you enter a term into the research box. Links to relevant news articles are displayed directly below the search box in response to a search conducted on Become.com. Links to news articles are displayed only when articles of interest to shoppers are available."

About a month ago, Become.com released a dynamic search term suggestion feature.

I've mentioned in past blog entries that one of the "Five Laws of Library Science" is to "save the time of the reader." Services like Become.com News Search seem to be embracing this idea in the age when lots of reading takes place online and clicking from one site or service to the next often wastes valuable time.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:47 PM | Permalink

June 23, 2005

Shopzilla Opens zLabs Tech Preview Site & Debuts Robozilla Shopping Service

Shopzilla zLabs is a new technological showcase area opened by shopping search engine Shopzilla. Now featured is Robozilla, a shopping search engine using the Shopzilla database but where results are said to be organized and clustered in a completely automated way. I take that to mean that unlike Shopzilla, there's no human intervention to ensure a product or merchant is in the right category. Want to compare? Here's the luggage category at Shopzilla versus Robozilla. At a quick glance, I suppose the Robozilla one feels a little better. The main point is that if the results are pretty good, the automation will help Shopzilla add more merchants and products efficiency but not lose relevancy. At least, that's the press pitch. More details from the company's press release: Shopzilla Showcases Technological Innovations with Establishment of zLabs.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:37 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2005

Top UK Shopping Sites For May 2005

Top 10 UK shopping comparison sites from Netimperative runs down the top 10 shopping search engines for the UK market in May, as provided by Hitwise. At the top, by a wide margin, Yahoo-owned Kelkoo UK.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Looking At AOL's inStore Shopping Site

inStore Online from Internet Retailer is a nice look at AOL's shopping site, inStore, from a retailer and strategic perspective. Launched last September (see our review), it examines how AOL hopes the service will attract searchers and retailers alike. Nice details on how AOL hopes it can drive traffic using its various properties but also how unlike other shopping search sites, inStore saw a recent (and slight) traffic drop. But AOL said those coming to the site are converting better than with the previous shopping site it ran.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:57 PM | Permalink

June 14, 2005

MSN Shopping Partners With PriceGrabber

We wrote in March about MSN beta testing a new shopping search engine. That public beta has since closed. When the improved service relaunches later this year, it looks like it will be at least partially powered by shopping search engine PriceGrabber. MSN and PriceGrabber has just signed a deal to put PriceGrabber listings on MSN by the fourth quarter this year. More details from MediaPost in MSN Shopping To Add PriceGrabber Listings.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:12 AM | Permalink

June 7, 2005

Become.com Now Providing Dynamic Search Term Suggestions

Via Threadwatch and an e-mail from Become.com's CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Yang, news that the shopping research engine is now providing dynamic search term suggestions that can help the searcher create a more precise query (with little effort) even before clicking the search button.

For more about Become.com, here's a link to a SearchDay overview article by Chris. Become.com joins other search services that provide dynamic search term suggestions. In some cases, suggestions are related to the popularity of the query. In other cases, the suggestions come from a controlled vocabulary of terms. Some of these services include:

News Accumulator from SurfWax PinpointShopping Google Suggest AOL Search PinpointTravel WikiWax from Surfwax Snap.com

Posted by Gary Price at 11:08 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2005

Shopzilla Sold to E.W. Scripps for $525 Million

Shopping search is hot.

As you know, eBay purchased Shopping.com last week and today, we're learning that Shopzilla (they also operate BizRate) has by acquired by E. W. Scripps Company for $525 million in cash. Scripps owns numerous newspapers, tv stations and satellite tv networks (HGTV, Food Network, Fine Living, etc.)

A webcast will take place here at 5:30 PM EDST this afternoon.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Shopzilla / Bizrate Acquired.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:52 PM | Permalink

June 1, 2005

eBay Goes Shopping and Acquires Shopping.com

Just crossing the wires is news that eBay (you've heard of them) has acquired comparative shopping search site, Shopping.com. According to the Wall Street Journal (sub. req) and TheStreet.com, eBay will pay about $620 million in cash or $21 per share for all of Shopping.com's outstanding shares. Shopping.com became a publicly traded company in October 2004.

From the WSJ: Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, said in an interview that eBay became interested in Shopping.com when it noticed its sellers listing merchandise on comparison-shopping sites, as well as eBay. Shopping.com, which is free to consumers, generates revenue primarily from merchants that pay fees when Internet users click on listings to reach their Web sites.

Mr. Cobb said eBay plans to integrate its listings with the product listings available on Shopping.com so sellers can reach another pool of buyers. "This is about continuing to fuel our biggest business," he said.

Lorrie Norrington, president and chief executive of Shopping.com, said the deal will bring Shopping.com users broader choices. The Brisbane, Calif., company, which will be operated as a separate eBay business, plans to marry its Epinions product and merchant review system with eBay's seller and buyer "feedback" system, which lets buyers and sellers rate their experience.

The news release announcing the acquisition is here.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:42 PM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

Become.com Gets More Funding

More dollars continue to fund search verticals.

The San Jose Mercury News article: $7.2 million in start-up's 2nd round, reports that shopping search vertical Become.com has raised more than $7 million in a second round of funding.

The investment is led by the Transcosmos corporate venture capital group, with participation from Silicon Valley angel investors Ron Conway and Bob Bozeman. Become.com will use the money to work on a price comparison shopping service, to be unveiled this summer, the company said.

Here's an overview article about Become.com that SearchDay published in April.

From the article: The [Become.com] crawler automatically identifies and categorizes web content, indexing only shopping related information and discarding other types of content. Become.com also uses human editors to further refine its index. "Before we push our latest index into production, our researchers identify authoritative and highly rated pages, and these are given preference in ranking and crawling," said Yeogirl Yun, Become.com's founder, chairman and CTO.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:47 AM | Permalink

May 18, 2005

SortPrice Gets Drag-And-Drop Shopping Feature

The SortPrice shopping search engine has added a neat drag-and-drop shopping feature to its service. Do a search, then you can drag images of products you are interested in and drop them into the left-hand side of your screen, to build up an interest list. Sadly, it only seems to work in Internet Explorer.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:23 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2005

Agreement Brings Product Info from Shopping.com to Answers.com

Word in this press release that Answers.com and Shopping.com have announced a partnership that will bring content from the shopping comparison engine to Answers.com pages.

Under the agreement, Answers.com will display product information from Shopping.com as a supplement to its content library. For instance, looking up "LCD Projector" on Answers.com will now provide - beyond the Answers.com complete explanation about the device and its technology - detailed information necessary for users to decide whether and where to buy a product, including access to product descriptions, reviews, and comparisons of merchant prices. Answers.com will receive a portion of revenues generated when consumers click through to merchants' sites.

Look for Shopping.com content to begin appearing on Answers.com this summer.

In other Shopping.com news...

I noticed that the Shopping.com now offers a mortgage rate comparison database for all 50 states. The service launched in beta about a week ago.

Shopping.com Mortgages allows consumers to shop for mortgages with the same detailed level of associated attributes; customized search; and structured, intuitive presentation previously available only in consumer products and unprecedented in financial services. At the beta launch, consumers have access to, and can compare rates from, multiple credible lenders with representation in all 50 states. Attributes by which consumers can customize the search and presentation of offers include, among others, loan type, points, loan amount, lender's regional profile, monthly payments, closing costs, and down payment requirements.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:13 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Searching for that Perfect Gift

Shopping search engines are great for finding just the right gift for special occasions—if you know what you're looking for. If you're still clueless about what to get Mom for her special day next Sunday, consider turning to a "gift recommendation engine," such as Yahoo's newly introduced Gift Finder.

Today's SearchDay article, Searching for a Mother's Day Gift, describes the new service, which is easy to use and returns some interesting gift ideas that you may not come up with on your own.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:17 AM | Permalink

April 25, 2005

Say Hello to Brilliant Shopper

Hot on the heels of Become.com's launch, Brilliant Shopper plans to launch this week. The company was founded by veterans from Ask Jeeves and other online businesses, and is hoping to plug the gaps and ease some of the frustrations experienced with existing shopping search services. Today's SearchDay article, A New Shopping Search Player, takes a look at this new player in the shopping search arena.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:39 AM | Permalink

April 20, 2005

Not Quite A Fair Shopping Comparison Test

Jason Dowell in Comparing Search Engine Results - My Experiment at Search Engine Guide decides to pit shopping search engines against each other. He comes away feeling that Google's Froogle, Yahoo Shopping and MSN are all the same, while Become.com has many more unique URLs. The problem is that he's not comparing like-to-like.

Become isn't currently listing products for sale. It's listing information and reviews about products you may wish to buy. That's great -- a feature we love (and covered more in Chris's Become.com Launches Shopping Search Engine article). But that's not pitting it fairly against the others. To get close to the same type of results on Become, you would have to do ordinary web searches at Google, Yahoo and MSN and then compare. Chances are, the uniqueness would then increase, since they'd be searching against a much wider range of data than just products for sale.

Postscript: Jason notes over here that he was comparing regular search results at the major search engines to Become, not their shopping search results. My apologies for misreading that.

It turns out that my thought that this might give the search engines more unique URLs doesn't pan out, since that's exactly what he did. However, it doesn't change the fact that this still isn't a quite a fair test for other reasons I didn't previously get into, because there was already one big problem I had with the study. But now it makes sense to dive into those other issues more.

Become is hitting a specialized collection of pages -- pages it deems to be shopping related. The major search engines are hitting the entire universe of pages out there. It's still not a like-to-like comparison.

Moreover, if someone is looking for shopping search results, they should be hitting the shopping search services that are offered by the major search engines. That's likely to increase relevancy, if they are in buy mode. Sure, many people don't do this. But they should, and reviewers should be encouraging them to.

If the searcher is in research mode, then Become very much fills a gap the major search engines don't seem to be doing well in. That's because if you're want to find a specialized collection of product reviews, they don't offer this. It's a frustration I've often felt in my own searching, and I applaud what Become is trying to do. But that intent doesn't mean that Become is perfect.

Here's an example. I wanted to buy a color inkjet printer recently. Supposedly, I could do a search at Become and find reviews, rather than people just trying to sell me printers. What do we get for color inkjet printer there?

1. PC magazine review of one particular HP inkjet, helpful if you understand that you can jump "up" in the site navigation to see other reviews
2. Lexmark printer reviews -- only they really aren't. It's more a page selling a particular product with four contributed reviews, something you can find on dedicated shopping search engines, but in greater quantity.
3. Another page from the same site as in number 2 -- in fact, what looks to be a mirror of the page.
4. Buy.com selling a printer.
5. What looks to be another mirror on a different site for what was in number 2.
6. Not a mirror of what was in number two, a different printer, but the same fairly low quality page with a scattered review and seemingly from the same site/data source.
7. Another shopping page with a single customer review.
8. A page selling a particular brand of printer, no reviews provided.
9. Another page from the same site as in 8, no reviews -- in fact, really just a page affiliate linking over to Amazon, where they sell it.
10. Another page selling a printer, no reviews.

So what did I get from Become? One page I think was great, the first one. Even then, you have to know to jump through the site navigation. Three other pages simply seem to mirror each other. The remaining pages are of low review quality.

Now let's go to Google. I'm only looking at them because it's enough to make my ultimate point.

1. Page from HP on how to choose a printer. Nice, actually, because it points you to all different models. But not really a review page.
2. Similar page to the above from HP
3. Printer reviews page from ConsumerSearch, a good site and great overview
4. Page for a review of a single, particular printer.
5. A list of printers for sale by TigerDirect.
6. Page from about listing Top multifunction printers. Not bad.
7. HowStuffWorks on how inkjets work. Not really for how to buy, best to buy, but navigating does get me to some shopping search results complete with user reviews.
8. News.com inkjet review of a particular printer, which with navigation would get me to more.
9. Amazon selling me an inkjet.
10. A manufacturer site.

What have we got? One great page and a second, if you know how to jump through the site navigation to other reviews. So double the relevancy of Become. Both Amazon and HowStuffWork also get me to what I suspect are better and more comprehensive user reviews that Become.com.

What's this tell us? That using counts of "unique pages" says nothing about relevancy. The only way to know whether a page is relevant or not, unfortunately, is to actually look at it. For all we know, the unique URLs Become is bringing to the table aren't valuable at all. As just this spot check above shows, three "unique" URLs that Become brought back seem to be mirrors of each other. The fact that Google has fewer unique URLs could indicate that it's actually better at not being duped by mirrors.

Or not -- I'm with Jason that on some queries, Become does feel better if you're looking for shopping reviews. Compare the results for GPS there to Google. Become gives me at least five sources that look (a very quick scan) like excellent beginning points; Google seems to give me one. But again, unique URLs wouldn't tell me any of this. Overall, I love having Become, and I look forward to seeing it evolve.

By the way, for more on the incredible difficulty in measuring search relevancy, see our Coke vs. Pepsi Challenge for Search Engines thread in the Search Engine Watch Forums for a number of links and background I've posted there, along with discussion of the problem.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:00 AM | Permalink

April 18, 2005

More Buzz for Become.com; BrilliantShopper.com to Launch Soon

Last Monday, Chris provided a great overview about the new shopping research engine, Become.Com.

Today, both the E-Commerce Times and the San Jose Business Journal have articles about the new search vertical.

Become.com co-founder Yeogirl Yun is 100% correct when he tells E-Commerce Times that a major challenge for his company will be getting people to change their search behavior and try something new. Changing behavior is a huge undertaking and I believe not only involves developing great technology but also involves marketing (people can't use what they don't know about) and user education. An ad saying "come use xxx search" is one thing but these days you also need to tell people why they should use it (with practical and specific examples) and how to take full advantage of what the technology has to offer. A little (and I mean little) education can go far. Yes, easier said than done, but nobody said it would be easy. One commodity many verticals can provide, IF the user knows about the engine in the first place, is saving people time by offering more precise results. This is good news for verticals since time is a commodity people want more of.

Finally, E-Commerce Times notes that another new shopping vertical from four former Ask Jeeves employees will officially launch soon. The engine is called BrilliantShopper.com and a beta version is now live at http://www.brilliantshopper.com/index.php.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:32 AM | Permalink

April 11, 2005

MySimon Founders Return for Encore

The guys behind pioneering shopping search service MySimon are back, with a new service called Become.com that offers a number of cool features to help you research, select and purchase just about anything imaginable online.

Today's SearchDay article, Become.com Launches Shopping Search Engine, takes a look under Become.com's hood, describing its features and explaining why it's approach to crawling for reviews, products and other shopping related information differs from other services like Google's Froogle.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:28 AM | Permalink

March 24, 2005

Shoppers Search For Deals, Then Buy

A study conducted by shopping service Shopzilla finds that 59 percent of consumers are starting shopping online at a search engine rather than going directly to a merchant, up from 46 percent three years ago. Search engines would include general purpose search engines like Google or Yahoo, shopping search engines like Shopzilla, Froogle or Yahoo Shopping or auction sites like eBay.

OK, since the source of the data is a shopping search engine itself, you have to of course question the rosy rise. But a rise doesn't surprise me. There's more choice on the web, and search engines -- in particular shopping search engines -- make it easier to see the full spectrum of what's out there.

Also reported are stats saying that 87 percent of online shoppers are now comparing offerings of online retailers against catalog merchants and retail stores to get the best prices, compared to 71 percent three years ago. The survey involved 923 online buyers. More details in this press release.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:54 AM | Permalink

Ixquick Adds Phone Search, Other Features

Long-standing meta search engine Ixquick has relaunched, with a new ability to look up phone numbers for people or businesses in multiple countries, shopping search results powered by various providers (such as PriceGrabber in the US) and a new "results honing" feature that lets you delete or move up pages listed in web results. Hate something? Use the X icon to move it out of the list and drop out other pages deemed similar to it. Like something? Use the checkmark icon to get similar results. A rundown of what else is new can be found in this press release (PDF format).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:20 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2005

More Press For the Vertical Search Biz

Olga Kharif's Business Week article: Search, the Next Generation, takes a look at the increase in specialized tools (aka verticals) that haven been coming fast and furious lately and several of which have been mentioned on the SEW Blog or in SearchDay before. You'll read about: + Become.com ||| SEW Blog Post

+ Nextaris ||| SEW Blog/SearchDay Posts

+ BlogStreet

+ FactBites

+ Snap.Com ||| SEW Post

Posted by Gary Price at 10:49 AM | Permalink

March 21, 2005

MSN Shopping Beta Tests New Version

MSN Tests Shopping Search Engine from MediaPost has some details about a new comparison shopping service that MSN is testing, the MSN Shopping Beta. Shopping search isn't new to MSN. It's long had a shopping area (once called eShop, now currently MSN Shopping). In fact, a link to shopping search was offered on the MSN Search site until several months ago. It was quietly withdrawn until the new shopping search is ready for a full public debut, I was told earlier this month by someone at MSN. So check out the new beta, which is meant to provide a more comprehensive round-up of products than the existing service along with other features. And expect that shopping link to return at MSN Search in the near future.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:37 AM | Permalink

March 11, 2005

Looking At Become.com

Who's Shopping? Who's Researching? has ClickZ executive editor Rebecca Lieb coming away impressed with the research versus shop search options that new shopping search engine Become.com plans to roll out. But as an "elephant" of a feature, it's something that the bigger search engines could also do, given that they do have "pure play" shopping search engines of their own. The article has some more details on Become, including the use of human editors to select sites with reviews. Consumer Reports content is mentioned being crawled -- Yahoo Shopping has long offered some of this content as well. Our own look at Become and how it is shaping up against other shopping search engines is in the works, so stay tuned.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:05 PM | Permalink

February 17, 2005

Shopping Search Technology Firm IM2 Gets Venture Cap Funding, Say Hello to FatLens

Those of you with an interest in shopping search might be interested to learn that Silicon Valley startup IM2 Inc. has received $8 million in their first funding round. An article from TheDeal.com goes onto say,

IM2 unveiled its FatLens search technology, which trawls e-commerce sites and presents its results in an interface designed for comparison shopping, in January. Now in beta-phase testing, the FatLens engine serves the online event-ticketing industry and will be expanded to include other industries in a few months, according to [CEO Nanda] Kishore.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:49 AM | Permalink

February 11, 2005

Become Shopping Search Beta Now Open

Want to beta test the new Become shopping search engine? The public is now invited to take part, if you're willing to register. Some background on Become in this earlier post. Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Become.com Launches Public Beta

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:24 AM | Permalink

January 28, 2005

Become.com Shopping Search To Launch

The founders of mySimon and Wisenut have come together to create new shopping search site Become.com. It's a closed beta right now, but Gary's planning a look for when the launch nears. A press bash and preview is happening earlier this month, and the launch itself will happen in late February. In the meantime, spotted via Organized Shopping, here's a short Q&A with Yang on the launch from Marketing Shift: Q&A session with CEO Michael Yang.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:03 PM | Permalink

January 13, 2005

Shopping Search, Contextual Ads & General Search Blogs Offered

I met up with Sean O'Rourke at our SES Chicago show who's heavily into shopping search and threatened to launch a blog on the topic. Now he's done it. The Organized Shopping Blog looks promising, so if you're a retailer interested in the important area of shopping search, you may want to tune in.

I've also been meaning to mention JenSense. That's a blog launched several weeks ago by Jennifer Slegg, more commonly known to many as Jenstar, moderator of WebmasterWorld's Google AdSense forum. Aside from being one of the nicest people you could meet, those I know into generating money from AdSense tell me she's one of the sharpest people you can talk to.

We don't cover much about contextual here, because as I've written before, it's not search. But it IS important to online advertisers and publishers, so check out Jen's blog.

To close things out, search marketing firm Reprise Media's just started its new blog SearchViews that's taking a look at search as a whole.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:42 AM | Permalink

December 21, 2004

Shopping: About.com and PriceGrabber.com Announce Partnership

Word that About.com and PriceGrabber.com have announced a partnership. Access to the shopping database is now integrated into the About.com site.

The news release mentions that the new partnership is "exclusive." Hmm. PriceGrabber.com currently powers the shopping search on other sites including Ask Jeeves, PCWorld, and MSN Latino.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:08 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2004

Shopping.Com UK and Google Extend Deal

Word in a SEC EDGAR filing from Shopping.com that they've extended a distribution deal with Google.

On December 7, 2004, Shopping.com UK Limited ("Shopping.com UK"), a subsidiary of Shopping.com Ltd., and Google, Inc. ("Google") entered into a Google Services Agreement (the "GSA") whereby Shopping.com UK will participate in Google's sponsored links program in the U.K., and will display merchant listings from Google's advertisers on the "Featured Resources" section of its U.K. service. Pursuant to the terms of the GSA, Shopping.com UK will generate revenues when consumers click through these listings to the Google advertisers' websites. The GSA is effective through November 30, 2006. Shopping.com UK may terminate the GSA on October 31, 2005 by providing at least 30 days prior written notice to Google.

Shopping.com UK had a prior agreement with Google in the United Kingdom that accounted for 2% of Shopping.com Ltd.'s 2003 revenues...

Posted by Gary Price at 6:58 PM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

Last Minute eBay Bargain Searching

Looking for that bargain on eBay? Last Minute Auctions lists any auctions with an hour or less to go and where the price is $1 or less. In other words, possible bargains that are being overlooked.

You can't keyword search but instead have to browse categories from the site's home page. Keyword searching would be nice, as would the ability to perhaps raise the price of auctions you scan.

Gotta go -- only 50 minutes left to get some Star Wars Micro Machines space ships for only $0.99!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:14 AM | Permalink

December 1, 2004

Shopping Search Tips For Advertisers & Merchants

Chris has blogged earlier about articles appearing this week as part of SearchDay's Shopping Search Week 2004. In addition, he's also drafted up a special sidebar article for our Search Engine Watch members. Shopping Search Services for Advertisers and Merchants provides links and more information about various programs offered by shopping search engines that give you more control over what's indexed or better visibility in product listing pages.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:53 AM | Permalink

What's New at NexTag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and Yahoo Shopping

Shopping search isn't just about finding the lowest price on products any more. The major shopping and product comparison services have significantly beefed up over the past year, now offering a full spectrum of resources including research tools, reviews from users and professionals, price alerts, shopping lists and other features. In short, they've finally become true one stop portals for just about all kinds of shopping activity.

And it's not just about products any more. NexTag has added tools for shopping for mortgages, travel, real estate and online education courses, with more services to come.

Today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search Update 2004, Part 2, describes all of these new enhancements, and more. It's the third installment of Shopping Search Week 2004!, our annual roundup of what's new and improved at the major shopping search engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 8:25 AM | Permalink

November 30, 2004

Froogle Germany Launches

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, say hello to Froogle Germany.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

What's New at Shopzilla, Froogle, and MSN Shopping

It's been a busy year for the major shopping search services. BizRate re-engineered its search engine and changed its name to Shopzilla, among other things. And Google added several new features to Froogle and launched a UK version.

Today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search Update 2004, Part 1, describes all of these new enhancements, and more. It's the second installment of Shopping Search Week 2004!, our annual roundup of what's new and improved at the major shopping search engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:36 AM | Permalink

November 23, 2004

Short Review Of Shopping Search Engines

From the San Jose Mercury News, Sites tell where to shop on the Web is a nice, short review of shopping search engines you might try for the holiday season. FYI, Chris Sherman's got an entire week on shopping search planned for the beginning of December. Stay tuned here or to SearchDay.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:37 PM | Permalink

November 18, 2004

Cash Back from Shopping.com

Shopping.com has launched its Smart Shopper Club, which refunds consumers up to 5% of the amount of each purchase, excluding shipping and tax, from participating stores. Stores participating in the program are identified with a Cash Back dollar amount for each product listed in green to make it stand out clearly on the page.

Sign up for the program and you can log in to your own account page that tracks your personal Cash Back purchase history and status. Shopping.com mails Cash Back checks to members every three months. DM News has more on the new program.

If you're interested in Shopping Search, watch for our annual Shopping Search Roundup, which will run in SearchDay during the first week of December.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:05 PM | Permalink

November 9, 2004

Product Pricing and Shopping Engines

Here's an interesting read.

Arik at Forbes writes about research by Michael Baye, Indiana University and John Morgan, UC Berkeley that looks at product pricing in the age of comparison shopping engines.

With ever more powerful and smart search technologies cropping up online offering new ways to compare prices--Google's Froogle, Product MySimon come to mind--wouldn't price-sensitive consumers automatically gravitate toward retailers with the lowest prices and thus unleash a fierce attack on profit margins?

Posted by Gary Price at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BizRate Becomes Shopzilla

A search engine name change to report.

Comparison shopping engine, BizRate.com has become Shopzilla.

The BizRate.com site and interface remains online but this Reuters article mentions that more products are accessible via the new Shopzilla site.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 8, 2004

Dulance Offers Price Tracking Via Web Feeds

Silicon Valley-based shopping engine Dulance, whose motto is, "Find Everything and Anything Sold on the Web" has announced a new service today that allows you to track price changes via RSS.

Dulance relies on a meta-search approach of the "open web databases" to find product and pricing information.

>From the announcement, "Shoppers can run a search for a desired product indicating their price limit. Dulance returns a list of shops that sell the sought product below that price. Now they can opt to subscribe to a RSS feed of results based on the same criteria. Subscribing to a Dulance RSS feed works much like subscribing to a news feed or blog elsewhere. The Dulance feed contains links to individual online stores selling the particular product, along with current prices. A "news" event is triggered when Dulance finds a new seller or a change in price. It is picked up by the shopper's RSS reader, as any other piece of news."

A couple of months ago I blogged about a new service called Watchcow.net. This service allows you to use RSS to track price changes in the Amazon.com database.

BTW, while perusing the Dulance site I noticed their AdFree search option. Searching with Dulance AdFree, "...eliminates all commercial listings from search results, including all sponsored links, paid inclusion and any product listings within the organic results." Dulance AdFree utilizes the Google database.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2004

New Options at Yahoo Shopping

This InternetNews.com story: Yahoo Launches Precision Browsing discusses some new refinement/narrowing options at Yahoo Shopping for some (not all) products.

Yahoo Shopping was also enhanced with new technology going live on Thursday. The improvements help users narrow their searches by clicking on a list of product attributes returned with results, a strategy that combines old-styled browsing with search. Yahoo calls this "precision browsing."

A Yahoo Shopping search for shoes allows you to quickly narrow/refine your results by: + Price + Store + Type It also mentions that more narrowing options are coming soon.

A search for dvd player allows the searcher to refine: + By Latest Price + By Manufacturer + By Disc Capacity + Dolby Digital Decoder + Other Media Supported + Progressive Scan

You're also to combine refinements. For example, show only DVD players with a price between $130 - $229 and manufactured by Sony.

Useful? Absolutely!

However, this new feature from Yahoo Shopping is not a new idea in the shopping search space.

Other shopping engines also allow the searcher to refine their results using criteria developed for specific product categories. Here are a couple of examples.

The recently launched Snap.com offers several refinement options based on product type. For example, here's a search for laptop computers. You'll see the refinements listed at the top of the page.

This is also the case at AOL's Pinpoint Shopping and Shopping.com.

Yahoo also offers "SmartSort" which allows the searcher the ability to interact with product reviews for consumer electronic products by manipulating "sliders."

Posted by Gary Price at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 25, 2004

Shopping.com Just About Ready To Go Public

Are you ready for another search-related IPO? Late word that Shopping.com's paperwork has been declared "effective" by the SEC. Their ticker symbol will be SHOP. Look for trading to begin on Tuesday.

The IPO (6,871,160 ordinary shares) is priced at $18.00/share.

Shopping.com originally filed for an IPO more than four years ago but pulled the offering shortly before Net bubble burst.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 23, 2004

New Shopping Engine: Cairo.com

The Contra Costa Times reports in: Sale item search engine sniffs out local deals, reports on Cairo.com, a new "locally focused" shopping search engine (similar to CrossMedia's ShopLocal.com) that will officially launch on Monday (if you want to take a look, the site is online today).

Cairo.com, from San Ramon start-up Cairo Inc., allows consumers to check out the latest bargains at nearby stores and compare prices on such items as diapers, wine and digital cameras. The site, debuting Monday, culls current on-sale items from 23 major retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and Toys 'R' Us, information available online and in local newspaper advertisements but often difficult or time-consuming to track and find.

The article correctly points out a limitation. I encountered the problem when I spent a few minutes using the database.

But the site has its limitations. It features only items currently on sale; look for an item like a curling iron that isn't discounted and it won't be there. There is also no guarantee that the item is in stock.

+ Search process begins by entering a Zip Code or City Name

Cairo.com allows you to search by: + Keyword + Advanced Search Inteface + Browse by Item, Merchant, or Brand

A results page contains: + Image of newspaper insert + Location of store (links to map and other location) + Ability to compare price using Froogle, Nextag, or Shopping.com + Sort results by Relevance, Price, Store Location, Retailer, and Distance + Google AdSense Ads (including image ads) + Registered users can set up email price alerts

Posted by Gary Price at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 1, 2004

Comparison Shopping Engines and the Small Retailer

In Comparison Shopping Threatens Smaller Sites, (posted on the WSJ's StartupJournal site, registration not required), Jeannette Borzo takes a look at comparison shopping databases from the small business owner angle.

Now, with e-commerce continuing to boom, big retailers have begun piling into comparison sites -- and making life a lot tougher for their small competitors. Not only is it harder for small companies to stand out when they're jostling with L.L. Bean, J.C. Penney and Circuit City, it's also more expensive. The rush of new competition has driven up the placement fees that companies pay for better spots in search results.

The article goes on to say that while all of this might be "chaotic" for the small retailer, comparison shopping engines, "can still be a great sales vehicle for retailers who know how to take advantage of them."

Posted by Gary Price at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 30, 2004

Froogle UK Quietly Launched

Froogle finally moves outside the US and opens a UK edition: Froogle UK. Being based in the UK, I plan to put Froogle UK to the test over the coming weeks against my longtime favorite UK shopping search engines DealTime UK, Kelkoo and Yahoo Shopping UK. FYI, Yahoo now owns Kelkoo but is still using different technology on its own site. Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread: Froogle coming to the UK.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

Sellling Online? Don't Overlook Shopping Search Engines

Specialized shopping search engines are rapidly gaining popularity. A recent Forrester survey found that nearly 20% of online users look to shopping search engines to help research and buy products.

In today's SearchDay article, Shopping Search Tactics, Shari Thurow reports on a panel at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference that focused on tips and techniques for optimizing and submitting feeds to these specialized engines, as well as the different approaches to measuring ROI and the effeciveness of a shopping search marketing campaign.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 27, 2004

Moo! A Bovine That Monitors Amazon.com

A new service (it's free!) called Watchcow.net monitors the Amazon.com database looking for changes in the price of ANY product (new and/or used) or an entire wish list. Changes are delivered into your aggregator as an ATOM feed. Creating a feed is very easy. Simply use the Watchcow.net bookmarklet on any Amazon.com page and click again to add your aggregator. Neat!

Posted by Gary Price at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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