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August 2005New Project: ShopSort
After a lot of testing, tinkering, and just plain breaking stuff, I am almost done with a tool that could solve the growing problem of too many great shopping engines: ShopSort. The site uses "federated search forms" to browse the search results at multiple sites. The goal here is to take the federated search form interface to its logical conclusion. Or at least one of its logical conclusions (the non-API variety). It is still a little rough around the edges (color, international, etc.), but I would appreciate any feedback, either in the post comments or via the feedback form. Could this tool be useful for comparison shopping? What do you like about it? How could it be better? ...any questions? + + + ShopSort: Home | About | Shopping | Local | Prices | Categories + + + p.s. - it is not only about the keywords... gift finders... more later.
New Project: ShopSort
Reflections on Kelkoo vs. FroogleSeconde réflexion sur Skype vs Gtalk actually seems to have more reflections on Kelkoo vs. Froogle. Pierre Chappaz recalls several sleepless nights after Google launched Froogle in late 2002, but equally interesting is the comment from Franck Poisson that says, (roughly), "one speaks more Froogle at Kelkoo than in-house at Google."
Reflections on Kelkoo vs. Froogle
Don't Buy Junk! - dontbuyjunk.com (beta)
At first, I thought it might be the arch-enemy of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, but no, it turns out to be a product recommendation site, and an interesting one at that. The design is clean and functional, and it looks like they have put a lot of thought into the early stages of the buying process. I'll try to look at this in more detail soon. Until then, here are some links: Home | Technology | Management | example: Digital Cameras
Don't Buy Junk! - dontbuyjunk.com (beta)
Interview with Talmadge O'Neill of Smarter.com
* Disclaimer: I have discussed a syndication relationship with Mezi Media regarding Coupon Mountain. Re: Promotional Information “If I was doing a search, and I only had the pricing information, and not the promotional information, I really wouldn’t have the best idea of where I should shop. That has really been the core thing that we have believed, which is that if you don’t have both the pricing and the promotional information, you are not really giving consumer the best information on where to buy. And given that our background is on the promotional side, we are coming at the shopping search space from a different angle.” Re: International Expansion “We built our engine, Day 1, to be double-byte, and to be portable to multiple markets. Rather than get to a point two or three years down the road where we say, okay, we’ve made it in the U.S., and now we’re going to launch internationally, and now we have to rebuild a completely different system, and we’ve got the currency conversion issues… we built it from day one to be portable, and we built in double-byte, which is necessary for Asian countries.” “The second thing I would say is, on the coupon side, before GoTo, I had spent practically my entire working career overseas, and many of the people we hired early on were not American citizens, but German or Korean or… so we actively looked for people with language skills. We felt that the U.S. market will always be more competitive, more difficult, ahead of the curve… but there are always opportunities to take what you learn in the U.S., and go into other countries and be a little bit ahead of the curve and establish a competitive footprint.” “While many other people have looked to Europe for their growth, we’ve had an office in China for two years, and we’ve had a coupon site in Japan for two years. We’ve got to the point where, while we are not insiders, we are certainly a lot more familiar with the environment, have built a lot of relationships with merchants, have identified where we get traffic, identified how you need to change your product to be successful in those markets. Those markets, from the U.S. perception, are very difficult to do, so we’ll be the first pan-Pacific player.” Re: China and Japan “There are some out there (in China). There are maybe six to ten that we are looking at, but no one has really made it into a business. In Japan, Kakaku.com is certainly in the lead, amazing amount of free traffic, they are publicly listed on the Tokyo exchange, their financials are very good, but it is still a fairly small operation, they are probably around fifty people. That is a market where it probably should be a lot bigger than it is, and other than Kakaku, on the independent side, there is not a lot there.“ Re: Category Emphasis “We started in the traditional SKU-associable categories like computers and electronics. We started in the categories that had more penetration, the categories that are genuine comparison shopping, where you have a product sold by many merchants. And we are rolling out what I would call the catalog side, or the shopping search side, where you have non-SKU-associable products. In August, we are launching Apparel, and in September, we are launching Home and Garden. I would think that in twelve months from now, we will probably have most of the major categories.” Re: Live Chat?!? “That is something that is still in Beta, but our idea here is that there are a lot of consumers who get to, say, a digital camera page, and they might have questions like, “what is the difference between a three-megapixel and a five-megapixel camera?” We are not quite up to 24x7x365, but we’re experimenting with providing live chat to consumers. Also, for merchants, we have a telephone number and people they can talk to. Before we launched comparison shopping, we talked to a lot of merchants, and I think one of their top complaints was that they could not get good customer service.” “I think we started putting it (live chat) up there intermittently maybe a month ago, and right now we are looking a the chat topics, and building a database of the most common questions and answers, and training up a team to be able to support that at larger volumes.” Re: How Many Shopping Engines? “I’m going to use a historical analogy of how in 1994 of how there was Altavista, and there were other people like Magellen and Infoseek and Excite, Yahoo was a directory, and Google only came around in 1998. There were a couple of cycles of “search is important” and “search is not important” and comparison shopping has been around almost as long.“ “My guess is long-term there are only 3 or 4 major shopping engines, but we’ve probably got another doubling or tripling or quadrupling of revenue by the time the market gets to the point where the engines are trying to take market share from each other. I think we are still in the period of the rising tide lifting all boats, but I would say we have not seen a lot of innovation in this space for the last couple years.” “I’m not sure if there is that much difference in MySimon in 2000 and a Shopping.com or Shopzilla today. Shopping.com and Shopzilla certainly say we are doing more products, and we have this new technology, and we return results in twenty milliseconds, but I don’t know from the consumer standpoint if there is that much visually that is different. I would guess that over the next couple years, the comparison shopping engines will grow, partially at the expense of general search, although general search will continue to grow. Everybody is going to do their own thing for awhile. We are going into Asia, some companies are going into Europe, other companies are getting into certain product or service niches. But then, whether it is 2007 or 2008 or 2009, there is probably either consolidation or there are some winners and some losers. Because at the end of the day, consumers are not going to remember five or six comparison shopping engines. It is kind of like the Jack Welch thing, where you have to be #1 or #2, because you need to be big in order to generate the revenues and margins to invest in products that are clearly differentiable.” + + + links - www.smarter.com | Smarter SMS | Company Information | Merchant Information p.s. - Brian Smith of ComparisonEngines.com also interviewed Talmadge recently, here.
Interview with Talmadge O'Neill of Smarter.com
FocusI've been meaning to post this for awhile, but the last few weeks have been too hectic. There is too much news and near-news in this industry, and I'm not going to try and cover everything in-depth. Instead, I'm going to focus most of my time and energy on two areas: (1) researching and quantifying the differences in the shopping engines of today (2) dreaming up and illustrating the features of tomorrow. Which is a fancy way of saying, Stuff That Interests Me. Most posts will get shorter, but a few will get longer, much longer. Maybe, just maybe, I'll come up with some ideas that will help comparison shopping arrive at its logical conclusion. Stay tuned...
Focus
Q&A with John Glick of Become.com at ClickZ, Part 2link: Q&A with new shopping search engine Become.com, Part 1 (clickz.com)
Q&A with John Glick of Become.com at ClickZ, Part 2
Funding for BrilliantShopper.com"Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Brilliant Shopper, Inc., an emerging leader in shopping search technology, announced today the completion of its Series A funding. Led by high-tech pioneers Donald Scifres and Michael Foster of SDL Ventures, this additional financing will accelerate development of Brilliant Shopper's proprietary e-commerce search functionality." more details and analysis at SiliconValley.com
Funding for BrilliantShopper.com
Info.com and FatLensInfo.com adds a "Tickets" tab, powered by FatLens. link: press release
Info.com and FatLens
Time's Coolest Shopping Websites for 200550 Coolest Websites 2005: Shopping (TIME.com) Shopzilla gets the nod for Comparison Shopping.
Time's Coolest Shopping Websites for 2005
Fun, Funwayyy off-topic The other week, one of my pals told me that I should go to a nearby bar for poker night, because of a more interesting than usual prize. Earlier this year, I won my first and only large-ish (200+) tourney, but promptly went into semi-retirement, after doing the quick math on time-vs-value. Heck, even if there was decent money in poker-playing for me, the poker lifestyle is not as appealing as the Internet lifestyle. Yet... I do enjoy the challenge of tournaments, so I went along. Last week, I won my first qualifier of 40 people. This week, I survived the second qualifier of 80-100 people (top 5 finishers qualified). Long story short, I'm off to glamorous Kansas City, MO next weekend to play for a free seat at Camp Hellmuth. How long can my luck hold up? I should probably get around to reading SuperSystem 2, just in case I need to manufacture some luck. Combined with the luck of the Irish, I should have a shot. Fun stuff, but I'm more excited about an upcoming five-part series on product reviews. :-)
Fun, Fun
Job Opening: Media BuyerGreg Yardley, former comparison-shopping employee and always thought-provoking blogger, is at a new company looking for an "adventurous media-buyer" with large-volume experience, and is happy to answer questions about it at jobs@trademediafutures.com. Especially interesting considering Greg's post on idea-centric companies.
Job Opening: Media Buyer
Misc.randomness Internet connectivity has been iffy this week. Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best next week. Lots of big stuff in the works. I had a nice long talk with Talmadge O'Neill, Co-Founder of Mezi Media, parent company of Smarter.com, a site that is moving quickly in many directions. Disclaimer: I am building an application that will incorporate data on a rev-share deal with Coupon Mountain, a site also owned by Mezi Media. I still want to take a more detailed at the new PriceRunner US, and might have some additional information on the new MSN Shopping. Also, if you cannot reach me due to email problems: Back to the getting caught up with email...
Misc.
Werner Vogels at ITConversationsFYI: a 45-minute talk by Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels at the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, E-Commerce at Interplanetary Scale. Only started listening, so I can't comment on it. After listening, I might be even less qualified to comment on it. Yet it seems worth passing on since his blog posts have been rare lately.
Werner Vogels at ITConversations
New! Yahoo Shopping Web Services API"You can use Yahoo! Shopping Web Services to search our database of millions of product offers and thousands of merchants." "Rate Limit: Yahoo! Shopping Web Services are limited to 5,000 queries per IP a day" via: Search Engine Watch
New! Yahoo Shopping Web Services API
MSN Shopping partners with Shopping.com"Shopping.com, a global leader in online comparison shopping, announced today that it has formed an alliance with MSN to provide users of MSN Shopping with access to millions of products from thousands of online merchants. Will be interesting to see how well MSN Shopping is able to integrate all the offers from multiple sources. This has the potential to make things better on niche searches, but it also has the potential to make things messier on popular products. I'll look at this in more detail when the dust settles.
MSN Shopping partners with Shopping.com
SearchViews: 5 Q's with Chris Jolley of MSN Shoppinglink: 5 Questions with Chris Jolley of MSN Shopping (searchviews.com)
SearchViews: 5 Q's with Chris Jolley of MSN Shopping
FatLens gets distribution with GoFish"GoFish Technologies, a leader in multimedia search, and FatLens (www.fatlens.com) today announced that the FatLens event ticket shopping search capability is now an integrated part of the GoFish digital media search platform." example: ColdPlay (red "Get Concert Tickets Now!" link)
FatLens gets distribution with GoFish
Q&A with John Glick of Become.com at ClickZlink: Q&A with new shopping search engine Become.com, Part 1 (clickz.com)
Q&A with John Glick of Become.com at ClickZ
PriceRunner GM Interviewed by socalTECH.comlink: Interview with Martin Anderson, General Manager of PriceRunner US (socaltech.com)
PriceRunner GM Interviewed by socalTECH.com
The New MSN ShoppingIt is official, the new MSN Shopping shopping functionality is live on http://shopping.msn.com/ Scott Austin has a long list of features at MSN Shopping Insider, Brian Smith has a nice long post at Comparison Engines, and I'm assuming the Search Engine Watch blog is going to provide background information. I'll try a different format and see if it proves useful. Here are my Top 3 most-favorite and least-favorite features of the new MSN Shopping: Pro: 1. RSS Feeds - Custom search-based feeds should be infinitely more useful than pre-defined, ill-defined category feeds (i.e. Yahoo Shopping RSS). I'm not sure how many people will discover all of the uses for this feature, but you can build a feed to include a search for a product name, a price range, product attributes, and even the sort order. Nice! 2. Recently Viewed - I like that they looked beyond just saving products, and included categories, searches and pages. 3. "Miscellaneous" - There are many improvements over the old MSN Shopping, but as a shopper who uses many comparison shopping engines, none of the other new features stand out from the pack, at this time. Con: 1. Attribute-Based Search - I admit, this is my pet peeve. In my humble opinion, MSN Shopping's goal of letting people compare products "without having to do any fancy manipulation of data" is somewhat ironic... because the only reason features like this seem fancy is because everyone is clinging to tired old interfaces. Become.com's multi-criteria search is an example of how easy this can be. Use the wrong interface, and comparing even a few attributes is a chore for the average user. Yet, even with the old-style interface, there is room for improvement, by replacing overly-narrow ranges (1.8-1.9GHz) with open-ended ranges (1.8+ GHz). 2. RSS Feeds - With so many ways to build a custom feed, this should be the greatest things since sliced bread. In reality, the content in the feeds is less than compelling. This is a problem with most shopping-related feeds... the content is sooo vague... no images, limited descriptions, no ratings, no merchants, no indication of sort order, no way to tell "which end is up" in general. 3. "The Content Area" - the site is sluggish today, images are slow to load, many products do not have images, many products are not grouped... making comparison difficult. Hopefully this is a temporary situation. + + + related links: MSN Shopping | Sitemap | Help | Feedback
The New MSN Shopping
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Smarter.com
