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.
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