Organized Shopping Blog: Shopzilla's Robozilla

July 17, 2005

Shopzilla's Robozilla

Back on June 22, Shopzilla announced their technology showcase, zLabs, and unveiled the first research project, Robozilla.

The announcement was mentioned here and here, but I have not seen any detailed reviews of Shopzilla vs. Robozilla. I recently spoke with Farhad Mohit, chief product officer of Shopzilla, to try and find out what this is all about.

The technology showcase zLabs, besides tapping into a larger audience of beta testers, has the added benefits of rewarding employees internally, and attracting new employees externally.

As for Robozilla, it is all about leveraging technology to scale beyond what can be done with human intervention. This has the potential to bring about more product offers with more structure than would otherwise be possible.

Currently, Shopzilla features 29,684,145 products. (The number is available near the top of their home page.) By comparison, Shopzilla throws the entire catalog at Robozilla, for a grand total of 50,981,674 products.

At the same time, Robozilla has the potential to bring structure to areas that have never had much structure. Take the example of the Luggage category, refined by the Samsonite brand at Shopzilla and Robozilla.

In this example, Shopzilla displays individual offers that go directly to the stores. It is still possible to compare prices, but it requires more work on the part of the shopper.

< The first picture is an example of a click-option at Shopzilla.

Robozilla, on the other hand, groups many offers, so instead of going directly to a store, you get an interim page with a side-by-side comparison of offers.

The second picture is an example of a click-option at Robozilla. >

A search for the related pages at Shopping.com, NexTag and PriceGrabber showed some grouping, but not as much as Robozilla. (And for an example of how thin these types of categories can be, see Yahoo Shopping.)

Also interesting is the first result for one dozen red roses at Robozilla. The search for one dozen red roses is already a pretty good one at Shopzilla. I think much of the improvement here comes to people who drill-down from Gifts, Flowers & Food > Flowers & Plants. In this sub-category at Shopzilla, the right-side content is less likely to be ripe for the clicking and probably requires more attribute-refinement from the left-side links. Yet in this same sub-category at Robozilla, the right-side content offers ready-made groups that could make additional attribute-refinement unncessary, in some cases.

"For the most easily structured data, everyone does this reasonably well," said Mohit. "What brings loyalty? The 'tail' searches." (reference: The Long Tail) In other words, if Shopzilla does a good job on searches like luggage, people will be more likely to use them to compare offers on common categories like digital cameras, too.

The automated structuring of offers could have additional benefits for shoppers. As Mohit explained, "once you free your people from normalizing, you have more time for better attribution, better sub-categories, clustering the stuff in Misc."

But for all its usefulness, Robozilla is still a demo site. Rebuilds are expected to occur twice weekly, to allow for algorithm tweaking. (The current version, 1.3.9.4, represents an algorithm upgrade that went live last Thursday.) The timing and the extent that Robozilla goes live on Shopzilla depends on how much progress can be made.

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Shopzilla's Robozilla (2)
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on July 17, 2005 at 9:01 PM
Archived at Shopzilla

Comments

Maybe I am missing something.

I only see 5 attributes on luggage at robozilla: Price, Brand, Material, Luggage type and Store. According to the site, there are 13,210 items in the category. I see exacrly the same 5 attributes on shopzilla.com, although it doesn't tell me how many items are in the results.

I count 8 at shopping.com: Price, Brand, Luggage Type, Exterior Type, Size, Feature, Material, Gender the item was designed for, and Store. There are "over 23,000" items in the category according to the site.

I count 6 at nextag Price, Brand, Luggage Type, Features, Materical and Store. The site claims to have 9,000 items in the category

Pricegrabber only has 3: Price, Brand and Category and only 1,367 items according to the site.

Seems to me that Shopping.com leads the market here followed by nextag, then robozilla second to last with PG bringing up the rear. What am I missing?

Posted by Anonymous at July 18, 2005 6:27 PM

In this case, I was looking at the number of offers per product. For the example of Samsonite luggage, the other sites are doing good to have a half-dozen offers grouped for popular products, and Robozilla regularly has at least a dozen-and-a-half offers. The way I see it, the total number of items in a category is a measurement of potential usefulness, but the way those items are grouped determines if in fact they are useful.

As for attributes, yes, your analysis for luggage is in line with my findings for non-tech goods.

http://www.organizedshopping.com/blog/archives/001316.html

Let's hope that any effiencies from programs like these help pave the way for better attribution.

Posted by Sean O'Rourke at July 18, 2005 7:15 PM