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December 2005Japanese Comparison Shopping BlogThis Japanese blog (http://blog.livedoor.jp/kakaku_hikaku/) looks like one of the earliest comparison shopping blogs, launched more than a week before yours truly. The "Kakaku Hikaku" in the URL works out to "Price Comparison" I think. It might be a long time until I am able to work out anything else (see: fumblingtowardsjapanese.com), but luckily their last post is in the international language of traffic rankings, with a dozen or so shopping resources grouped by ranking proximity into three big Alexa charts.
Japanese Comparison Shopping Blog
Anyone near St. Louis?I'm always excited to find anyone interested in ebusiness in St. Louis. And now seems like a good, quiet time to re-raise the question, in case anyone in the area was not aware of my whereabouts... so, anyone from St. Louis?
Anyone near St. Louis?
Kaboodle, ListsI'm still trying to wrap my head around Kaboodle (www.kaboodle.com). Apologies to Manish for not having the time to follow-up yet. I've been hoping to pick up some bite-sized tips about what makes the service uniquely useful at the Kaboodle Blog. But it was probably the comment on John Battelle's searchblog that broke things down into the simplest terms: "The challenge with Amazon's Listmania or Yahoo! Shoposphere is that they confine you to one single web property... The power of Kaboodle is that it works with ANY site on the web. That, in and of itself, could add value, I suppose. Granted, Amazon is no slouch when it comes to the number of products, the same with Yahoo Shopping, so Kaboodlers will have to push beyond the most common/obvious products to get the full benefit of aggregation. But the thing that gets my about all of these pick lists -- Amazon, Shoposphere, Kaboodle -- is, what next? How can these lists work together to be more than the sum of their parts? In other words, a good list can be very useful, but, as far as I can tell, there has not been a lot of emphasis on value-mining the relationships between these lists. update: heh, just popped into Amazon.com, and they have the "Most Wished For Items" is on their home page, cool. ...okay, now what? related thought, possible silliness: am I the only person wondering why no comparison shopping engine has specifically gone after the bridal registry action?
Kaboodle, Lists
Cairo.com FundingOld news from November: additional funding for Cairo.com. see: SiliconBeat
Cairo.com Funding
Product Review Free-For-AllI wish I had more time to read this stuff right now, but here are some links for anyone who wants to read ahead: via: Can You Game Amazon Reviews at paul.kedrosky.com ...a down-n-dirty look at ">Amazon.com user review irregularities at freakonomics.com ...which leads to a scholarly-looking paper on the effect of online book reviews on sales (.PDF) by some folks at yale.edu.
Product Review Free-For-All
Why I Don't Use Shopping Comparison SitesWell, not me, I've been known to do a wee bit of comparison shopping, but that is the title of a post from Rob Hof of The Tech Beat at businessweek.com. It is a good counterbalance to the industry's mini-buzz from the holiday season and a year full of acquisitions. see: Why I (Mostly) Don't Use Shopping Comparison Sites (warning: "plugfestivus" in the comment section) A lot of people have asked me when the comparison shopping space is going to blow up, come into its own, tear the roof off, or whatever you want to call it. Growth is a given. But how much growth, how soon, and is there a tipping point? I suppose at the very high level, you can look at it from two major angles -- 1) people will be able to reap more benefits from comparison shopping as they get more familiar with the functionality that is available 2) new, transformational, low-learning-curve functionality help everyone to be more effective/effecient shoppers. But I digress. Here's my take on Rob's arguments. (1) The Amazon.com/eBay argument: Not every purchase requires comparison shopping, thank goodness. Still, I think comparison shopping sites have the opportunity to add value to the shopping process for a much wider range of products than it has in the past. More attributes for "non-traditional" categories could, in some cases, save hours and immeasurable frustration, but the problem is you need a critical mass of attributes for the experience to be even the slightest bit useful. (2) The familiar vendors argument: I think this argument gets stronger with each passing year. Initially, price sites were hot. Now pricing is commodity, more or less. The thing that never goes out of style is a more "holistic" comparison shopping experience, with more emphasis on selecting the product that will maximize long-term satisfaction. (3) The non-gadget buyer argument: Most of these sites started with gadgets, but many of them have been moving quickly into home, appare, etc. Even if these do not require heavy attribution (but they DO, they DO), we should see more product selection, more user reviews, maybe even new ways to shop for visually-oriented products. (4) The clumsy filters argument: See, it is not just me who says this! :-) (5) The lack of time argument: I am a glutton for punishment on this topic, probably more than any sane person. I've had to spend hours just to get anywhere close to consensus on product selection. If I was Joe Sixpack, I would throw my hands in the air and try someone equally scientific, like the "Eenie Meenie Minie Moe" method, and save a metric load of time. While time is a serious limitation to comparison shopping, it could also remain one of the biggest growth areas. For every "X" minutes saved in the shopping process, these sites becomes affordable, timewise, to "X" more people. Rob ends with this question, "Still, I know a lot of people use these sites, or so the traffic numbers suggest. So tell me: Why?" For me, this kind of goes back to one of my original posts. When everything comes together perfectly with comparison shopping, it is amazing. When you've had the ideal shopping experience in one area, you tend to crave that same kind of experience with every category. The more you know about all the comparison shopping options, the larger the potential effectiveness gap between the online "CSEs" and other methods of shopping/comparison. Even if I'm almost certain the comparison shopping engines are not up to snuff in a particular category, it is worth a look, eh?
Why I Don't Use Shopping Comparison Sites
ConsumerReports mini-comparisonConsumerReports puts the comparison shopping engines to the test: * Overview and Recommendations but this kind of "black box" study lacks too much in the way of details, IMO.
ConsumerReports mini-comparison
Price-What?A little slice-of-life that shows how far comparison shopping still has to go... Friend: I heard Experian bought PriceWatch today. And this friend is not your grandmother, he is a programmer who is online a lot...
Price-What?
StepUp gets funding from VCs, grief from alarm:clockIt has been awhile since I looked into StepUp, but alarm:clock has a frank review of the service.
StepUp gets funding from VCs, grief from alarm:clock
Smarter.com.cn and Smarter.co.jpVery cool to see Smarter launching so soon in both China and Japan. From what I can tell, the Chinese site is more sophisticated than the Japanese site. Or rather, the Japanese site looks more focused on categories like apparel and beauty, instead of attribute-oriented categories like computers and electronics. Both of them look to be filling out quickly, as evidenced by their Google page counts: site:smarter.co.jp = 211,000 In particular, the Chinese site seems to be gaining traction: (RSS readers: click here to see the Alexa graph) OT: I'm in the early stages of trying to learn the Japanese language, maybe all these comparison shopping engines -- old, new and future -- will serve as interesting learning resources.
Smarter.com.cn and Smarter.co.jp
Decrapifying User-Generated ContentEarlier, Greg Linden brought up the issue of filtering junk "UGC". Now, Ian McAllister of MSN gives a more detailed overview of filtering techniques. Speaking of bad words, comparison engines might do well to flag words like N*geria (1) (2) for manual review...
Decrapifying User-Generated Content
SNAP Product Finder UIThere is a lot that is cool in the user-interfaces at SNAP, and also a lot that is just plain weird. Kinda Cool: product-related searches on the general search engine can trigger the "Snap Product Finder" attribute filter. You have the web search results in one frame, attribute filter in another frame, merchants in another frame. A little busy, but you gotta break some eggs every now and again... example: laptop The really cool part, for me anyway, is attribute sort. I rarely see this. Sometimes, like in the case of laptops, I want to know what model has the biggest monitor, the smallest monitor, the most CPU, RAM, HD, weight, battery, etc. SELECT is everywhere, but where is SORT?
SNAP Product Finder UI
NexTag RSSGot around to looking at NexTag's implementation of RSS, very nice. Like with MSN, you can combine the search results with attribute filters for more meaningful alerts. The feeds themselves look very clean, with small pictures complementing a few small sections of well-formatted text. My only quibble is they placed the RSS button -all- the way at the bottom of the page, even below the site footer. This dynamic feature is trapped in static-link no-man's land. In other words, when I see a standard-looking footer, I'm not expecting anything in it, or below it, to be different from page to page. Even as much as I rely on RSS, I have to do a double-take to remind myself that this feature is somehow tied to the dynamic search content in the heart of the page. Ah well, perhaps when RSS becomes more mainstream the little icon will appear to the right of the "Showing __ of __ matches" text.
NexTag RSS
Catching Up on Comparison ShoppingFor the next few days, I'll be catching up on the last month of comparison shopping news. For anyone new to this area who would like to catch up on the last year of comparison shopping goodness, Search Engine Watch is running their year-end Shopping Search Week, including What's New in Shopping Search 2005 and New Players in Shopping and Comparison Search.
Catching Up on Comparison Shopping
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