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March 2005Kakaku.com: Japanese Comparison Shopping Engine... Wow!How did it take me so long to find such a large comparison shopping site? I am shamed... Stats as of February 2005: NOTE: There is more corporate information on this page in English. Now for "WOW"... This is a site that clearly does not have to worry about limitations such as small monitors or low bandwidth. Not only that, they have a triple-sort option (translate: Babelfish or Google) on their attribute-based search pages. Nice! + + + In related news, due to an unexpected wave of new opportunities, I will not have time to attend the Tokyo "Search Engine Strategies" conference in April. Hopefully, I'll have better luck next time.
Kakaku.com: Japanese Comparison Shopping Engine... Wow!
Shopping.com France - First Lookrechercher, comparer et acheter... Today, Shopping.com did what it said it would do and expanded its shopping service to France, http://fr.shopping.com. I had time to look at several categories, and this site looks like the real deal. shopping.com - digital cameras, laptop computers, refrigerators Sure enough, my contact at Shopping.com confirmed that the FR site has the same attributes as the US site, plus some additional attributes specifically for the local audience. That might not seem like a big deal, until you look at the difference in functionality at sites like Yahoo Shopping and their unconnected counterparts in India and Japan and Australia and... I have not confirmed, but have to assume, that Shopping.com was able to seed the user ratings from their other sites. The only thing I did not see was user reviews, which was to be expected, or a link to add new reviews, which was not expected. I'll look more into the European expansion in the coming weeks.
Shopping.com France - First Look
Apartment Shopping ResourcesFYI, I have added a page for
Apartment Shopping Resources
More Context For Feature Findersfrom the department of random ideas: No matter where you search for a In-Context Information If you want to see product information in the right place at the right time, look no further than usability-lovin' Epinions. Under resolution on their digital camera feature-finder page, there is a "What is resolution?" link, which leads to a brief description. Also, at the top of the page, they have links to an in-depth buying guide and a practical "wizard" tool. My only quibble is the "What is resolution?" link could include, or link to, information from the buying guide and/or wizard tool, such as how many megapixels you will need for various print sizes. After all, the goal is to give people enough actionable information so they can be comfortable with their buying decision, and you do not accomplish this goal with a dictionary definition. Feature History Graphs Honestly, I don't know if I have seen this before, but the images have been bouncing around in my head for some time. Maybe it can be useful, maybe not. All I am presenting is the possibility that product-feature trends can be useful shopping information. When I say product-feature trends, we could simply track the number of products with each feature over time, but I think it would be more interesting to track changes in user drill-down behavior. Maybe both could be useful, plus the relationship between availability and popularity. We have cool tools for prices (see: NexTag), why no cool tools for features? This first example is probably only good for curiousity...
...but what about features that have competing industry standards? In these cases, pick the wrong format, and bad things happen. In some cases, you will have less cross-device compatibility, and in most cases, you will have less "bang for the buck" over time. In the graph below, all things being equal, which memory format would you choose?
The above examples are for the best-served product category on the Web, digital cameras, but this type of supplemental information could be used for other areas. How about vacations? Let's say you have a limited budget and unlimited flexibility. What if you could look up, by city, the average daily price of airfare and hotels for the last year? Now what if you could overlay that graph with information about temperature and precipitation? Okay, I'd better stop, I'm getting silly. Or am I?... :-) Most-Popular Features Graphs are great, but there are possibilities with text, too.
Amazon.com taps the "collective wisdom" of its shoppers at the item level. Who is to say a comparison shopping site could not do the same thing for the most popular features? Or, in addition to including the number of items in parentheses for each feature-option link, perhaps there is a way to also include a popularity percentage next to all features? Summary Like I say, maybe this could be useful, maybe not. All I know is we have a lot of shopping engines providing roughly the same functionality, maybe it is time for some experimentation.
More Context For Feature Finders
New Comparison Shopping Site: Amazon.comI have been meaning to add a category and start covering Amazon.com, who is really a comparison shopping powerhouse, disguised as a retailer. No time like the present, considering this interview with Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels in BusinessWeek. Highlight: "Vogels believes Amazon will get close to providing users with perfect information within five to 10 years."
New Comparison Shopping Site: Amazon.com
Email Q&A With Michael Yang of Become.com
I recently emailed some questions to Michael Yang, the Founder, President & CEO of Become.com. We had exchanged emails before, but had not found time to talk. Not knowing when our schedules would cooperate, I went the email route to get the ball rolling, and Michael was kind enough to answer the following questions about their direction. We are planning to talk later this week, and I will try to add detail on these and other topics. If you would like to pass along any ideas before then, feel free to contact me. + + + Do you see much room for innovation on the "comparison" side, or will the bulk of the innovation come from the "crawler" side... or the integration of the two sides? Right now many of the comparison shopping engines have very similar offerings, so we definitely see the opportunity to innovate on the comparison side. Likewise, there hasn’t been a real quantum shift in web search technology since Google introduced PageRank, and that was in the late ‘90s. Become is first and foremost a technology company, and we are looking to revolutionize both these areas, as well as being in a unique position to combine them. Besides the reliance on outgoing links (in addition to incoming links), can you provide any more detail on what is different about the Affinity Index Ranking algorithm? AIR ranks web pages based on their level of interconnection with web pages on the same topic. Both inlinks and outlinks are evaluated to understand the level of interconnection among the sites. Links from valuable web pages on the same topic work to increase the score of a web page; links from off-topic sites do not help. Linking to spam pages or off-topic pages can reduce the score of the page generating the link. Advanced mathematics and concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics are used to calculate specific scores. Do you think standalone link-based algorithms will eventually be supplemented by direct visitor feedback? Is your five-star rating system a hint in this direction? Link-based connectivity is an important aspect of evaluating web pages, and we believe that our methods of evaluating connectivity are significantly more accurate than the methods used by major search engines today. Direct visitor feedback is another indicator of the value of a web page. While direct visitor feedback may be used to supplement connectivity information, we do not believe that it will replace link-based algorithms in the near term. How many pages do you estimate Become.com would index if you did not filter non-shopping pages? We have specifically focused our crawling efforts on US-based content which is oriented toward shoppers. We do not have an accurate estimate of the number of pages indexed if we conducted a worldwide crawl of all types of content. Do you plan to extend the upcoming shopping-comparison service into other countries or languages? Yes. We plan to expand internationally after establishing our service in the US market. + + + see also:
Email Q&A With Michael Yang of Become.com
My Experience Advertising on John Battelle's SearchblogLast week, I got a little crazy and advertised on John Battelle's Searchblog. Here are the down 'n' dirty details: + + + I started this blog on December 31st of last year, and other than some targeted emails and some targeted AdWords, I have not done much in the way of promotion. There are so many things I want to analyze and understand, so many ideas I want to share before I lose them, that there is not much time for anything else. Still, "traffic" to the site has been growing, slowly but surely. More importantly, I have come in contact with a growing number of fantastically interesting people, which is the real joy of working in the Internet industry. Now, I like text ads -- always have, always will. I also believe in having an online advertising slush fund, i.e. forcing myself to use a small part of the budget for unadulterated experimentation. So after seeing "Want to Sponsor Searchblog" on a near-daily basis, it was only a matter of time until I gave it a whirl. If you put me on the spot and demanded an objective for this advertising campaign, I would say to put my site in front of an audience of super-interesting, internet-obsessed people. From there, whatever happens, happens. After some fiddling, I settled on the ad below. The main goal is to raise awareness that while there is an infinite universe of general search blogs, there is currently only one blog devoted entirely to shopping search. As such, I am able to cover some aspects of shopping search in more detail than the general search blogs. I tried to convey this in the form of a question and action-answer. Then there is the practical matter of mentioning my name and blog name for the people who do not click.
Here is the activity summary for the seven-day period:
* added: Advertisers (#) is the total number of advertisers sharing the sidebar at Searchblog. Monday, March 14 Tuesday, March 15 Wednesday, March 16 Thursday, March 17 Friday, March 18 Saturday, March 19 Sunday, March 20 Monday, March 21 SUMMARY Would I advertise on that site again? Why am I not advertising this week? What would I do differently next time?
My Experience Advertising on John Battelle's Searchblog
Interview with Co-Founder of WorkZoo at FyberSearchI must confess, I like to understand how a site works before posting, so as not to waste your time with sites that are not uniquely useful. Such is the case with the bumper crop of job search engines. Are they really great, or are they blowing smoke? In many cases, I have absolutely no idea. Yet. So I was excited to see a ten-question interview with Mark Maunder, CoFounder of job search engine WorkZoo.
Nice, nitty-gritty stuff, all the way down to their server specs. How can I not be curious about a site with a cool animated .gif (more info) and a non-corporate corporate weblog. If I can make enough progress on the ol' To Do list, I'd like to run an in-depth test of the job search engines. Although, if I'm lucky, another search blogger will do the in-depth testing and I can just link to them. :-)
Interview with Co-Founder of WorkZoo at FyberSearch
Gifts.com Review at ConnectMe NetworksConnectMe Networks talks about Gifts.com and IAC/Jeeves, plus a seven-slide review of the Gifts.com. The blog as described in an earlier post as "how shopping is likely to change over the next few years." Shopping + Future = I had to subscribe. (XML)
Gifts.com Review at ConnectMe Networks
Google Group for Froogle MerchantsNew! Froogle Group, where you can exchange information with other Froogle merchants: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Froogle-Merchants/ (via Social Patterns)
Google Group for Froogle Merchants
Increasing Keyword Prices vs. Increasing Keyword VolumeThe Wall Street Journal says keyword prices may be overdone, while Kevin Lee of Did-it.com says they have room to rise. Meanwhile, David Jackson of InternetStockBlog.com looks at advertising costs in total, and says they are outpacing revenue for many web-based companies. At least, I think that is what everyone is saying. It is kind of like when you see that beer is good for you on CNN, but they run a conflicting report before you have time to down a Guinness. I think people like to talk about keyword prices because they are easy to measure, but keyword prices never tell the whole story. You could have falling keyword prices and rising keywords costs, and vice versa. The key, of course, is volume. Similarly, keyword prices do not always move in the opposite direction of ROI. for example... The Comparison Shopping Dynamic Meet Joe Shopper. Joe does his comparison shopping using keyword PPC ads, clicking each advertiser and making mental notes. Today, Joe is shopping for widgets. In the past, there were 4 widget advertisers. Currently, there are 8 widget advertisers. Joe still has the same amount of money to spend, but now he is racking up twice the clicks. At least twice the clicks, because the chance of forgetting important information is higher, requiring re-clicks. So, how do the widget advertisers react to Joe's shopping behavior? In theory, everyone will adjust their bid prices to account for the lower conversion rates, but in practice the lag-time varies greatly, from same-day to not-until-we-go-bankrupt. In all probability, in the this example, keyword prices will fall, keyword costs will rise, and ROI will fall. For everyone wishing for lower click prices, be careful what you wish for. :-) Better to wish for higher ROI, regardless of keyword prices.
Increasing Keyword Prices vs. Increasing Keyword Volume
Become.com Interview Podcast at ZDnet.comIt is Friday afternoon, time to kick back with an audio interview. Will Become.com become the next Google (MP3) (Answers a lot of my questions -- back to the drawing board, heh.)
Become.com Interview Podcast at ZDnet.com
Study: Price Comparison May Lead to Higher PricesSo says a sassy summary of a study published in the March issue of Management Science. Researchers throw water on Internet comparison shopping (austin.bizjournals.com)
Where is my old library card? I might do the unthinkable and read the article before commenting. I mention this because Waleed Muhanna's website has several interesting-sounding studies, including "Search and Collusion in Electronic Markets" and "The Impact of E-Commerce on the Real Estate Industry" on the publications page. The first one is pending publication, but the second one is good to go. p.s. - I have to take issue with the title at BizJournals... "throw water" on comparison shopping? Just because one component of comparison shopping did not live up to some people's unrealistic expectations, which some would argue is a lower-order component anyway, we are to throw water, presumably dirty bathwater, on the baby that is comparison shopping? Objection... Sustained!
Study: Price Comparison May Lead to Higher Prices
Interview with NexTag Co-Founder Rafael Ortiz at SES NYC
I also get the feeling that, as much as any other shopping comparison company, NexTag "gets" things like blogs and RSS. Although they have not done anything with these tools on the consumer side, their employees were among the earliest adopters of the Organized Shopping Blog. They also moved quickly before my last-minute trip to Search Engine Strategies in New York, as my press contact was able to arrange a meeting with Rafael Ortiz, Co-Founder and Vice President of Marketing, who was on the Meet The Shopping Search Engines panel. Despite only being in town for one day, battling icky weather, and having to prepare for his session later that afternoon, Rafael found time to answer some questions after lunch, even missing the first part of the Shopping Search Tactics session. Here are the highlights: + + + Q: NexTag has been expanding into a lot of new categories lately. How do you decide on which categories to enter? A: We simply look at what consumers are spending money on, and where we can add value. So if you look at a category that consumers spend money on online today, and you rank them on the total dollar spend, and then you look at whether comparison shopping engines can add value, that pretty much tells the story. So if you look at the top of the consumer discretionary spending online, you have travel products. Surprisingly, comparison shopping for travel is a relatively new category. So we look at travel, we look at financial services like people comparing rates for auto insurance. Five years from now, we won't be having this kind of conversation. It will be assumed that comparison shopping engines need to address these categories. Comparison shopping today, in some respects, is at the same point e-tail was five years ago, when people debated if Amazon should get into all these additional categories, when there were product specialists like eToys just focusing on toys. I think what the Web has really proven is, if you can add value to the process, it is relatively easy to expand into other categories, and it makes a lot of sense. Q: When I think of NexTag, I think of the price comparison features -- price graphs, price alerts, etc. Have you consciously focused more on price features, or is it something that just evolved? A: Our overall principle is to give more relevant information to shoppers to make a better decision. So when we think about buying things, what's the first thing you want to be able to do? Well, first of all, you want to be able to find the product you are interested in, so it goes without saying you want to find something easily, and you want to easily compare the different sellers and the prices of those products. The prices of those products, as we now know, don't end with the retail price. The true price ends once you understand how much you are going to pay in tax, if there is any tax, and how much you are going to pay in shipping. And it is useful to have some context in terms of what the historical price has been. We think that helps the shopper make a better informed position. There are also non-price attributes that we focus on. If you look closely at that price history chart, you'll see that we also track the popularity of the product, in terms of the number of clicks out to stores, so it gives buyers some idea of the popularity of the product that they are looking at. We think there are many price attributes we can provide to make it a more efficient process. If you think about markets that are more sophisticated than comparison shopping today -- Wall Street comes to mind -- if you think about how traders are buying commodities, they have a tremendous amount of information to help them make buying and selling decisions. It is really not that inconceivable that comparison shopping for consumers will get to that kind of evolved state. Is it there today? No. Do buyers need big trading screens showing them what the market is doing for an iPod? No, they don't. But if you just take the general premise that more relevant information at your fingertips makes you a better shopper, I think there is a lot the industry can do to improve that whole process. Price is certainly a part of it, but it does not end there. Q: How does seasonality relate to what you do as a comparison shopping engine? A: There was a time when we looked at Q4 as really the quarter, but because of the types of comparison shopping that we do today, our seasonality is not quite as dramatic as, I think, others in the category. If you look at Q1, the quarter we are in now, we actually have some categories that are at, or near, their seasonal peaks. Q1 for travel is a very large quarter, so we have a lot of people doing comparison shopping for hotels and flights. Comparison shopping for certain financial products, such as refinancing and loans, anything to help them save on their tax payments, is very big at that time. Of course, consumer product sales are at a low point now and will peak in Q4. In the second quarter and Q3, in the summer-time months, real estate comparison shopping -- finding realtors, buying homes, selling homes -- will be at its peak. So what we do is look at what functionality we need to deliver in those peak times. If you look at Q4, holiday shopping, we focus on scale, being able to bring in datafeeds from thousands of additional retailers. If you look at what we focus on in the summer-time, we will be focused on trying to connect shoppers with as many of the right real estate agents as possible. It really depends. Q: Everyone talks about traffic and how many unique visitors they had in December. What other metrics do you feel are important... i.e. number of advertisers?... A: The retailer count, I think, is a little misleading. It is generally better to say, the more retailers that you have, the better, and so I think there is a real arms race to claim that you have the most retailers. What it ignores is whether you are really helping shoppers to comparison shop for what they spend money on. If you look at consumer discretionary spending, the vast majority of people spend their money on travel products, consumer goods, houses, and autos. So, specifically, what companies in comparison shopping talk about today is, "we have ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand, a billion retailers." But they are really only looking within a certain slice of comparison shopping, consumer goods. If you define it as all of the other categories, then you are talking about all the hotel providers, the travel agencies, banks, auto dealers, etc. You could have a ton of retailers that just sell digital cameras and sound like you have a comprehensive site. But does your comparison shopping site have thirty thousand auto dealers? Five thousand banks? All the hotel chains? So we need to be able to talk about the breadth of categories that are addressed. + + + see also:
Interview with NexTag Co-Founder Rafael Ortiz at SES NYC
Become.com on Affinity Index Ranking (AIR)Become.com issued a press release touting their new AIR algo. see also: Become Talks on AIR at John Battelle's Searchblog.
Become.com on Affinity Index Ranking (AIR)
Oops. re: ArbitrageOops. "Cleanup on aisle nine of the Organized Shopping Blog." After my stickler-for-detail post Arbitrageurs vs. Prequalifiers, I'd better 'fess up to a mistake and throw myself at the mercy of the court. In an earlier post, *I* used the term arbitrage to describe what should have been called "long-tail pricing opportunities" or something similar. It took an external article to clarify my thinking on this matter. Ain't that always the way. * * * On a semi-related topic, the buying and selling of clicks can get so routine that it feels risk-free. And it is, until it is not.
Oops. re: Arbitrage
More Product Attributes at Epinions?In January, I wrote about hidden attributes at Shopping.com, and how some of these attributes did not appear on Epinions.com. Today, some product attributes are still hidden at Shopping.com, but all of them are clearly visible at Epinions.com. Yay! I understand the emphasis is on driving traffic to Shopping.com, but I am more in tune with the usability choices at Epinions.com.
More Product Attributes at Epinions?
Shopping Search Interviews at MarketWatchBambi Francisco might have missed the mark in the arbitrageurs.com article, but it does link to a slew of interviews with shopping search executives: Rafael Ortiz, Co-Founder of NexTag Good stuff. Free registration required.
Shopping Search Interviews at MarketWatch
Shopping.com Overseas OperationsFrom JPost.com: "Gov. regulations cloud shopping.com Israel plans" (free registration required) The Jerusalem Post reports on a press conference by Shopping.com CEO Dan Ciporin in Tel Aviv. highlights: On a related note... new shopping engines tend to get more posts, but Shopping.com is the clear leader in cataloging product attributes.
Shopping.com Overseas Operations
Amended Agreement - Epinions and Google(excerpt) "The Amendment extends the term of the GSA through May 1, 2006, and eliminates the minimum number of clicks and click-throughs that Shopping.com was required to deliver, as well as the minimum amount that Google was required to pay to Shopping.com under the terms of the GSA." source: Form 8-K
Amended Agreement - Epinions and Google
Arbitrageurs vs. PrequalifiersRegular readers know my disdain for using the terms "price comparison" and "shopping comparison" as if they were synonymous. Today, I have a new pet peeve, courtesy of Bambi Francisco at MartketWatch. (see: The arbitrageurs.com: VCs may fuel a future paid-search bubble)
Arrgghh! Let's nip this in the bud, because it devalues the work of everyone who is adding real value in the shopping comparison space. ar·bi·trage (n.) - the purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy. American Heritage Dictionary two key differences: A company that is in the business of adding value can also take advantage of pricing discrepancies, but that does not mean the two concepts are synonymous. If You Want To Look At Real Paid Search Arbitrage... ...look no further than "AdWords affiliates" who are selling traffic direct-to-merchant. Immediate resale? Yes These are the clear-cut arbitrageurs, and their revenue-per-visitor is the arbitrage baseline. Anything about that baseline, long-term, will be won by the middlemen who provide above-average value. In Defense of Middlemen Who Earn Their Keep I know pundits like to predict the demise of middlemen, but I'm partial to this quote from Kevin Kelly in New Rules for the New Economy:
Shopping Comparison and Merit-Based Advertising Adding another wrinkle to this topic is the AdWords ranking formula that uses click-through rate (CTR) in addition to maximum bid.* That means there is always a human element, and this is never strictly a financial proposition. You can work all you want to identify undervalued keywords, but if you do not click with the customer, you do not get access to the market. (calculation explained: post #11) Luckily for the comparison shopping sites, they have plenty to offer in exchange for a user's click: feature finders, feature comparisons, user product reviews, user merchant reviews, price comparison price alerts, the list goes on. This does not always sit well with retailers, who get tired of seeing the same comparison sites in the paid and organic search results. Still, in my experience, "killer shopping apps" are more commonly found at aggregators, not retailers. In merit-based advertising, if you offer a useful service and can convery it in a short text ad, that can be a very real form of pricing power. I have tried to illustrate this "comparison dynamic" with the following made-up text ads:
Conclusion I agree with the basic math of overcapitalization + overbidding = distaster for companies that focus on the filthy lucre of arbitrage more than the real job of prequalifying. However, I think a paid search bubble due to shopping-search restructuring would be a mini-bubble with a short lifespan. I certainly would not mention these sites in the same breath as boo.com. If we look past the investment fads, there is a big-picture trend here. The shopping engines are creating more value than ever, and there is plenty of opportunity for improvement. And I'm not just talking about the obvious shortcomings of Froogle. I'm talking about all kinds of synergies between services and technologies. What if every product category was served as well as digital cameras?
Arbitrageurs vs. Prequalifiers
Online Travel Aggregators beat Airline Web Sitesvia ClickZ: "Greater selection is a major inherent advantage for online travel agencies," said Dr. Bonny Brown, Keynote's director of research and public services. "But online agencies are also creating a better overall online experience for customers..." Let's see... the middlemen who live or die by adding value, they actually add value! Who would have guessed?
Online Travel Aggregators beat Airline Web Sites
New Hobby: Shopping Interface DesignI have decided to take up a new hobby: designing a next-generation interface for comparison shopping, regardless of what is practical or probable. Reason #1: A vision is starting to materialize, and it is going to haunt me if I do not capture it. Reason #2: I need to repent for the Nielsen-esque green and yellow of Organized Shopping. Reason #3: If it is a hobby, then my work hours might get down to a respectable number. I mention this because... * If enough of the right sites offer APIs, I might be able to turn it into reality. * If not, I would like to find a company with the resources to make it happen. * If I cannot do either of the above, I will publish it on this site.
New Hobby: Shopping Interface Design
Danny Sullivan on Vertical SearchBloggers have been going back and forth on the issue of vertical search, but now we have a weigh-in from search heavyweight Danny Sullivan. via ClickZ: "I can't say it enough. Vertical search is going to take over," he said. "The people who are going to win are the people that understand shopping search now." Keep saying it, Danny, keep saying it. :-)
Danny Sullivan on Vertical Search
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