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October 2, 2007

Microsoft Acquires Shopping Search Site Jellyfish

Microsoft has acquired Jellyfish, a comparison shopping site that launched in June with a pay-per-action ad model.

Jellyfish acts like a reverse auction through which retailers are ranked according to the amount they agree to lower their prices. The more they drop the price, the higher up in the search results advertisers appear.

On the Live Search blog, a Microsoft rep said, "We think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 9:48 AM | Permalink

August 8, 2007

Hearst to Acquire Social Shopping Site Kaboodle

Newspaper and magazine giant Hearst Corp. has agreed to acquire social shopping site Kaboodle. It will fit into the Hearst Interactive Media and Hearst Magazines Digital Media units.

"Kaboodle is a natural overlap for Hearst Magazines," Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines, said in a statement. "We think Kaboodle has terrific potential for many of our brands, especially in the fashion, beauty and consumer technology categories. Our readers will be able to find the products featured in our magazines, shop electronically with their friends and get their feedback. It's another means for making sure our readers stay engaged in today's saturated media landscape."

Kaboodle combines shopping search with social media, with several sharing tools added last year. It connects people with similar tastes, and lets users create and join groups. Kaboodle launched its public beta in 2006 and reportedly has more than 2 million unique monthly visitors.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 11:19 AM | Permalink

August 1, 2007

SEW Experts: The Impact of Comparison Shopping Sites on E-Commerce Sales

In today's By the Numbers column, "The Impact of Comparison Shopping Sites on E-Commerce Sales," Eric Enge discusses comparison-shopping sites, and their impact on buying decisions, resulting in shorter conversion times.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

March 26, 2007

What Makes Us Search Online To Buy Offline?

Our online behaviors certainly influence the retail buying cycle. According to a recent National Retail Federation study, a whopping 93% of respondents spend time online first, including 35% who regularly research and another 58% who occasionally research online before buying in person.

What's surprising is that online media arenâ€™t the most important influences in triggering an online shopping search. Well over 40% of respondents individually identified TV, magazines and newspapers as the most important triggers. By contrast, just 28% mentioned e-mail ads and only 25% claimed internet ads of any kind!

Other online communications arenâ€™t significant influences either. Only 7% of respondents mention blogs, 9% IM, and 8% online communities as triggers to search online. These sources increase slightly among 18-24 year olds, up to 14% blogs, 22% IM and 21% communities.

After respondents finish searching, communications become more personal. About 69% speak to someone face-to-face. Another 53% send emails, 50% pick up their land-lines and 30% make cell calls.

Once again, online interactions fall short. Just 4% blog, 15% IM and 7% participate in communities. Here you see a pick-up among 18-24 year olds, as 9% blog, 38% IM and 21% use communities. Also some 24% of this age group sends text messages.

So while search dominates the retail discussion, everything else weâ€™re doing online hasnâ€™t made that kind of singular impact among shoppers yet.

See References: National Retail Federation announcement; Big Research's study approach; and MediaPost's summary .

Posted by debbyr at 11:12 PM | Permalink

February 14, 2007

Shopzilla Shuffles Execs, Leads Scripps' Push Online

Shopzilla announced Tuesday that its founding chairman and its president of two years will depart from the shopping search engine in the spring. William Glass, currently chief operating officer of Shopzilla, has been named president, replacing John Phelps, who has served as president of Shopzilla since shortly after it was acquired by E.W. Scripps in June 2005 for $525 million, and was its COO prior to that. Farhad Mohit, 37, Shopzilla's co-founder and chief product officer, will also depart.

Scripps, which had been primarily a newspaper company, has been struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of acquisitions like Shopzilla and U.K. vertical search site uSwitch, as well as expansion of its Web properties for TV brands like HGTV and Food Network. In 2005, the company launched a niche broadband strategy which included a distribution deal with Yahoo Search.

The print side of its business has slid so far that Scripps is rumored to be considering a sale of its newspaper properties.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 6:11 AM | Permalink

February 5, 2007

Krillion Joins the Online Shopping Space

The local online shopping space is quickly crowding up. Given the vast majority of online product research that ends in offline purchases (about 75 percent according to comScore), we've seen a few companies develop over the last 18 months in order to lead and track offline conversions.

NearbyNow launched last summer to provide product and retailer information for malls and shopping centers. StepUp Commerce meanwhile continues to attract an impressive amount of small business advertisers that wish to put their product and inventory information online. StepUp's acquisition by Intuit in September will position it to distribute this capability (along with Google AdWords) across Intuit's massive installed base of QuickBooks users (including 3.7 million small businesses). Finally, ShopLocal works with big box retailers to bring their circular information (product sales, availability and pricing) online.

Today, Krillion launched with a similar focus on this big box segment. More specifically, it is going after buyers for "considered purchase" items. According to co-founder and CEO Joel Toledano, this includes products that are more than $500 which, because of their size and price, are more likely to be bought locally.

"These tend to be larger bulky items that are bought in a physical store because they might be a touch and feel purchase such as a flat screen TV, or something that you want to talk to a salesperson about,â€ says Toledano. The company will start with an emphasis in the $18 billion home appliances category, but will eventually grow into other categories that similarly include large ticket items, such as consumer electronics.

One of Krillion's silver bullets will be its proprietary crawling technology that brings in raw product data, combined with its integration of this data into a series of search results pages that correspond to the many combinations of specific products, brands, categories and 40,000 US local areas. After doing this for the past 6 months, the company at launch has more than 275 million product and location results pages.

"This focuses on the ready to buy local customer who has done their research, is at the end of the buying cycle and is now essentially putting their hand up when their doing their query and saying 'hereâ€™s what Iâ€™m looking for, hereâ€™s where I am, just tell me who carries it'," says Toledano. "Think of it as the yellow pages meets Shopping.com"

Instead of considering itself a destination site for local shopping, Krillion will push content out using SEO so that these individual product results pages can be found in Google organic results for local product queries.

â€œThere are only a half dozen brands like eBay and Amazon.com where people actually go to the URL bar and type it in," said Toledano. Beyond those, whether its Shopping.com or Shopzilla, consumers on a broad swath simply donâ€™t know those brands. They type in the product or retailer in a Google Yahoo! search box.â€

The company will also integrate targeted ads throughout these specific product pages including links to complimentary products such as accessories or items that are part of corresponding appliance sets.

Given the many permutations of location and specific products, some will be more obscure than others and recieve more traffic than others. Regardless, the targeted nature of these searches, and their positioning near the end of the buying cycle for high consideration items, will make the ad space more valuable.

â€œTo an advertiser, there is a great deal of value in the targeted nature of this," says Toledano. They donâ€™t have to do shotgun broad brush approach to advertise on a general category such as the term â€˜digital cameraâ€™, where they are lumped in with many other advertisers.â€

This could be attractive to big box advertisers, and offer more of a granular local product search than is currently offered by ShopLocal and others. Gaining traffic and communicating its value to consumers could be its biggest challenge at the onset, but given that it will piggyback on the already existing brand affinity and traffic of Google, this could be easier for Krillion.

Its success here will therefore come down to its ability to execute successful SEO tactics throughout its hundreds of millions of product result pages.

Posted by MikeBoland at 9:07 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

January 31, 2007

Retailers Should Focus on SEO, Shopping Search

Retailers should move beyond their traditional paid search campaigns and pay attention to SEO and shopping search engines, according to a new study from TrafficLeader. We talked to the authors for today's SearchDay, "Search Presents Challenges for Retailers."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 10:42 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2007

Online Spending Tops $100 Billion in 2006

According to an Infoworld report on Y! news, online shopping increased 24 percent over the previous year, with consumers spending $102.1 billion in 2006, topping the $100 billion mark for the first time in history.

As predicted, Cyber Monday (nov. 27, 2006) was not the busiest online shopping day of the year, as a total of eleven other days saw higher spending.

The top three spending days of the holiday season were:

Dec. 13th - $666.9 million Dec. 11th - $660.8 million Dec. 4th - $647.5 million

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 1:52 PM | Permalink

December 13, 2006

Online Shopping, on your Phone

Most online comparison shopping sites are rich with text and graphic images displaying all manner of info about the wares they are peddline. That makes for an awkward interface if you're trying to check out a site on your phone. Fortunately, most major online retailers have slimmed-down search interfaces that let you quickly access product information from your phone. Gary Price has a roundup of these services in today's article, Shopping Search, Via Mobile Phone.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:11 AM | Permalink

Ho, Ho, Ho - Holiday Shopping Search Skyrockets

This year's Cyber Monday numbers shattered the record books, with significant increases of online shopping site visits and a reported $600 in online retail sales, up about 42% over last year. But to call it the biggest online shopping day of the year may be premature; as online retailers offer special shipping and other tantalizing offers to consumers, traffic to retail websites is increasing steadily in the midnight hour.

In the most recent issue of SearchReturn, Detlev Johnson noted that we may not have seen the biggest online shopping day yet, as last minute deals and exclusive offers will continue to drive online sales higher as Christmas day approaches. According to the Information Week article Johnson references, online retailing is starting to look a lot like brick and mortar sales these days, driving customers to their stores in droves with sales of the bluelight variety.

With Overstock.com, Macys.com and Amazon.com running limited online specials, consumers clicked on to those sites repeatedly to be one of the lucky customers. Admittedly, once I read this - I was sucked into Overstock as well - signing up for a chance to get the elusive PS3 console for only $50.

Meanwhile, Hitwise reports a 4.8% increase in traffic this week to the Top 100 US Retail index over last year during the same period.

Toys, electronics, apparel and accessories, understandably top the list of most popular search terms, increasing exponentially over the previous week.

â€œOur search term data reveals that the 2006 holiday season is the first time that new digital toys have outpaced some of the more traditional items in our top searched-for-list such as Barbie, Bratz and American Girl,â€ said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. â€œHowever, Baby Alive, a doll originally introduced in 1973, took two spots in the top ten, demonstrating a renewed interest in retro toys.â€

Should we assume, then that the 'fisher price digital camera', up 110 percent in search traffic, fits into that digital toy category or the electronics one?

In the electronics category, the Nintendo Wii is outpacing Playstation 3 on the order of three to one, although both consoles are in short supply, clearly the Wii appears to be in higher demand.

For apparel and accessories, Hitwise also notes Ugg boots have made a triumphant return to winter fashion. Apparently, that means Uggs must be the perfect boot to tuck your "skinny jeans" (into) - one of the most popular searches on SortPrice.com this holiday season. SortPrice.com, a shopping engine we covered earlier this year, notes these products as their most popular search terms among 3 to 4 Million unique monthly visitors:

1. Canon PowerShot SD600 2. Apple iPod Nano 3. Microsoft Zune Digital Player 4. LG Chocolate Cell Phone 5. Diamond Earrings 6. Men's Watches 7. Skinny Jeans 8. Women's Ankle Boots 9. Satchel Handbags 10. Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 12:00 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2006

AskTheLocal UK Shopping Search Engine

AskTheLocal is a shopping search engine with a subtle difference; rather than find websites that offer particular products it matches the search query with a postcode to enable shoppers to visit a shop in person to buy the product. Another important difference is the reference to 'postcode' rather than zip code, because AskTheLocal is a UK resource.

The concept is very simple - retailers list their products with the search engine and users input their location and then search for products using free text terms rather than a listing or menu approach. The results screen then usually displays a photograph of the product, a description, the option of comparing prices or linking into Technorati in the hope that someone will have written about it, other items from that retailer and of course the price. Information is also given with respect to the physical location of the shop offering the product, the opening hours and telephone number. Finally there is a link to a map - the emphasis with AskTheLocal really is on locating products and then going and physically buying them.

It's a simple idea and well executed; while I have a few (minor) reservations about the service it makes a real change to find a local search engine for local people, and it is certainly worth exploring if you're in the UK. A similar service (not associated with AskTheLocal) is ShopLocal, so American readers need not feel left out.

AskTheLocal has already got a number of high profile retailers on board, such as Marks and Spencer, Argos, ToysRus and JJB which is helpful, given that searchers are almost bound to find some results for their searches. There are as yet only a very small number of local shops or chains, which limits the value of the service and I suspect areas of the country that are not well represented; I ran a search for a product and got results from shops that were up to 28 miles away and then the next result was for a shop that was over 200 miles away, so coverage is patchy at the moment, though hopefully it will increase in due course.

I would have liked to have seen a link to a retailers website as well - while I appreciate the emphasis of the search engine is on providing physical locations for products a link to a website is to be expected. Most of the items did have good descriptions, but I found a few cases when the result was limited to the title of a product while didn't actually help very much, though to be fair this is a criticism of the retailer and not the search engine itself.

While the service is still quite basic additional functionality is being introduced; the option of being able to check availability and the option of including discount coupons makes a lot of sense.

All in all, it's a search engine and concept that I think shows great promise, and once it has more large retailers signed up, and especially a lot more small niche specialised shops getting involved this could prove to be a very useful resource indeed.

Postscript from Greg: In addition to ShopLocal in the U.S., NearbyNow and StepUp (acquired by Intuit) are putting local business inventory online.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 9:40 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

Like.com Offers Visual Fashion Search

Image search company Riya has applied its matching technology to a new fashion shopping site called Like. The idea is that you if you find a fashion item you like -- a particular handbag, pair of shoes, watch or jewelry -- the search engine will find related products by examining the actual image. You can keyword search, browse products or browse items worn by celebrities to get matches.

I love watches, so I gave it a spin. In particular, I have a large collection of Swatches. So, I started off to see what swatches would bring back. I got plenty of matches, and a "Hawaii" swatch on the first page caught my eye.

Clicking on it brought up a new page, allowing me to pick what I liked the most about it in degrees using sliders, for these criteria:

Color
Shape
Pattern

It was the pattern more than anything else, so I kicked that slider up. The results changed, bringing up mainly heart monitoring watches first. Not what I wanted!

Next I tried browse mode. I was able to drill into the analog round matches, but none of these were to my fancy.

Now it was time for what's clearly the hype factor -- search for something that a celebrity is wearing. The gallery has only two men, and while I have little in common with either Diddy or Brad Pitt, I went the Brad route. One shot of him was when he was wearing a watch, so I clicked on that.

A page came up with watches similar to what he had. Was this image matching magic? Preset examples always make me wary -- they typically have been refined and fine-tuned. Even if not, I don't know that I need image matching technology to easily find watches like he was wearing. Here -- see accessories like those worn by Cameron Diaz, no image search required.

The real test will be when, as Somewhat Frank says, you'll be able to upload images of your own and do searches. Or, you can play with searches of the many existing images and see how it goes. I wasn't blown away by it, but I only did the few queries above. Another product, another search, perhaps it would be great. It's certainly worth trying and keeping in mind.

Riya's Like.com Is First True Visual Image Search at TechCrunch talks about the background, the idea that Riya is a leading company trying to match images based on images, rather than words. Riya's received lots of attention over the past year for its technology, but it's notable that so far, the company doesn't seem to have had much financial success. This type of matching is the third direction it has now gone in.

First, Riya seemed targeted to help you upload photos of people and do face recognition to find others. Then Google was rumored to be interested, though that never went through. Google later acquired another image recognition company, Neven Vision.

Riya shifted to being a web image search service, which remains running at Riya.com. The current focus on fashion products is tied to where Riya says users were most interested. ZDNet has more on this. You can also check out CEO Munjal Shah's blog for background.

Need another review? The Wall Street Journal takes a look for paid subscribers in Where to Find a Famous Look and seems mostly happy.

Like the idea? Here are some reports of shopping search engines with matching features you might like:

Postscript: Pixsta tips me off to Chez Imelda, where they power visual shoe search. Gary Price also has a list of other visual search services here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:41 AM | Permalink

October 31, 2006

Smarter Launches Visual Search

Seems that just last week I mentioned a shopping comparison engine launching a color search feature. Well, this week it's Smarter's turn to take the colorful spotlight.

Smarter.com today launched visual search. Visual search can be found by clicking on the Clothing & Accessories tab or by searching for any product within that section. Right now it's is a bit hidden as the consumer has to click on a small link under the header.

Differentiator here is that Smarter's visual search is all about clothing. Users select gender, then a top (shirt, sweater, etc.), then a bottom (pants, shorts, etc.), then choose the color for each. Smarter then returns two bands of products (the top on top, the bottom on the bottom) so users can see what the shirt and shorts might look like together.

More information (with colorful screenshots) on ComparisonEngines or try out Visual Search now.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:07 PM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

Search Influenced $15.2 Billion In Consumer Electronics Spending Through First Half

As the latest in an ongoing series of studies that capture the evolving and complex nature of consumer behavior today, Yahoo yesterday released findings from a joint study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study was fielded in June of this year and surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. adults who were pre-qualified as intending to make consumer electronics (CE) purchases.

The study looked at five CE categories: cell phones, computers, digital cameras, MP3 players and televisions. Below are the top-level findings:

The amount of online research was tied directly to the price of the product. Because higher priced products are more "considered" purchases, people spent more time doing online research. The range of time was nine hours for cell phones at the low end and 15 hours for TVs at the high end. The average duration of online research prior to purchase was 12 hours.
Of all purchasers of CE products in the study, online buyers were a significant minority (29%), while most purchases happened in local stores (71%). Of those buying offline, almost three quarters conducted online research prior to purchase.
Search engines in particular were used by 45% of the survey population that ultimately purchased in a local retail store.
On average CE consumers in the study used visited six manufacturer and/or retail sites before purchase. In navigating to those sites 55% used a search engine to go to the site, while 46% directly entered a URL. Approximately 10% followed a link from another site.
In terms of the range of sources used by purchasers (both online and off), the top four in order were as follows: 1) Internet 2) print 3) word of mouth 4) retail/other.
In terms of recall, CE consumers remembered seeing ads in various media in the following order: 1) print ads in magazines or newspapers 2) TV ads 3) Internet display ads 4) email 5) radio and 6) billboards. For Internet display advertising 40% indicated they recalled seeing an ad for the product.
One of the conclusions of the study was that of the $32.5 billion spent on the five consumer electronics categories in the first six months of the year, online research influenced $25.1 billion of that spending. Among the online sources, the study also concluded that search had a direct or indirect influence on $15.2 billion of CE buying.

Finally, the study examined the differences between â€œsearchersâ€ and â€œnon-searchers,â€ "based on self-reported search engine usage during their research and purchase process." This is what the research determined:

"Searchers, defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed. They are more educated about what they buy, increasingly likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are often considered a resource of information by friends and family. They consider more brands and are 114 percent more likely to consider Internet display advertising in their research process."

Posted by Greg Sterling at 3:52 PM | Permalink

October 23, 2006

Become Adds Color Search

Become follows Etsy and Shopwiki in adding a search by color feature. Once consumers perform a shopping (as opposed to research) search, "a Color Search bar appears at the top right of the results page. Users can mouse over the color they desire from over 1000 shades to find exactly the red shirt, grey suit, pink shoes or pumpkin-colored dishes they want."

I have a screenshot posted at ComparisonEngines, but I encourage you to try it out for yourself by searching for a dress, handbag, or seven jeans. Here's the press release.

Become also recently redesigned its site.

Posted by Brian Smith at 4:03 PM | Permalink

October 2, 2006

Why IAC's Pronto Will Succeed: Partnership With Ask

There are many reasons to like Pronto among the many crawler based shopping search engines:

- Comprehensiveness (read last week's press release) - Upcoming features that provide a better user experience - Monetization through an ad system not called Google AdSense - Not relying solely on the PPC engines for traffic - Online ad market is hot and will continue to grow - Ecommerce is hot and will continue to grow

While these things are the building blocks of a great new shopping service, they aren't the be all, end all. Other companies can and will develop powerful crawling technology (although Pronto is obviously proud of their own). There are other companies in the shopping space whose sole focus seems to be to provide a better user experience. Other companies will develop powerful ad systems (Kevin Ryan has done it before) or focus on high CPM based graphical advertising. Other companies have and will continue to focus on marketing channels besides the PPC engines. Oh, and everyone is benefiting from strong ad rates and ecommerce growth.

So you want the real reason why Pronto will succeed? The company is part of the IAC family. At some point in the next year, assuming Pronto continues to innovate and build on its solid foundation, the company will replace PriceGrabber as Ask's Smart Answer partner for all product searches. This was by no means confirmed with Pronto or Ask or IAC, but it's an obvious evolution.

And here's why it matters:

Ask.com currently has a 6% search marketshare with 6.5B searches being conducted in August (according to comScore). Assuming no growth in monthly searches ever (which isn't realistic), that means there are 390m searches conducted on Ask each month. I'd estimate that 20% or 78m of those searches are product related. Now if the Smart Answers featuring Pronto are triggered for about 70% of those searches (probably a very high percentage compared to the number PriceGrabber gets), there will be aprx. 54m total impressions for Pronto's listings. Assuming a CTR of 6% for those listings, Pronto will receive aprx. 3.2m clicks per month on it's listings or aprx. 40m clicks per year. A strong start.

There are a number of business issues to work out before Pronto replaces PriceGrabber. First, I don't know when PriceGrabber's contract runs out. I asked a long time ago and got no answer. Second, I'm sure that PriceGrabber's listings monetize a hell of a lot better than Pronto's listings (every PriceGrabber click is paid). So if Ask changes partners, it's going to lose out on some revenue...yes, Pronto can and will increase it's CPM, but it could take a long time to be really competitive with the established players. The business decision for Diller and crew then revolves around the opportunity cost of cutting revenue (albeit probably a small percentage) for Ask in favor of building up an ancillary IAC brand. Knowing a bit about Diller's track record, I have a feeling he's going to be fine with backing Pronto.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:01 PM | Permalink

Need A Costume For Halloween? Try The CostumeZee Costume Search Engine!

This is an entirely commercial operation, but with Halloween looming on the horizon, one that may prove useful. CostumeZee is a search engine that enables searchers to locate costumes for particular events, such as Halloween, or themes such as Pirates. Costumes for both children and adults are available, as well as appropriate accessories. The links do all seem to take searchers to American based sites however, so if you're outside the US, order early and cross your fingers.

Posted by Phil Bradley at 10:11 AM | Permalink

September 25, 2006

Goodbye Froogle; Hello Google Product Results In Web Search

Froogle, Google's shopping search engine that launched with big hopes back in 2002, is to be deemphasized in place of product listings integrated into regular Google search results.

The news has come out through Google's participation at the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance Summit last week in San Francisco. IDG has coverage of it here, saying:

A Google official shared the news with attendees at the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit in San Francisco this week, according to people at the conference.

When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, wrote Bear Stearns analysts in a note published on Friday.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service, wrote the analysts, who attended the Google official's presentation.

The association with the eBay sellers group and product results "powered" by Google Base is causing some confusion, in my view, about eBay "killer" Google Base "replacing" Froogle. Let's back up.

Froogle used to have its own feed mechanism to allow merchants to submit products. This system predated the system for sending material into Google Base.
In June, the Froogle submission system went away, replaced by submission to Google Base (and see also here). If Froogle was being "replaced" by Google Base, this is the time it happened.
Google Base has never been designed as a standalone service for searchers. The user interface there hasn't been that appealing, nor have searchers been seriously directed to it. In fact, the search box on the Google Base home page was just dropped, not something you do for a service designed for searchers. It is something you do, however, to help Google Base's mission of being a centralized submission tool for Google.
Google has been testing ways to flow customized results from Google Base into regular Google, to help deal with the invisible tabs issue I've long written about. My Google Real Estate? It's Google Base Again, Google's Vertical Play from earlier this year explains this integration in more depth.
Putting product results into regular Google results makes sense, just as it does for any type of vertical or custom results that Google does. This has mainly been through OneBox results, but the new Google Base-style placements allow for the search box on results pages to contain more options, ones helpful to narrowing for product or other type of vertical searching.

Froogle as a brand and destination set for demotion was pretty clear when it was dropped from the Google home page last month, a position it held since 2004. That placement never helped Froogle much, in part because many people simply ignore the little links above the search box entirely. In addition, in my view, Froogle is a cutesy name that never explain what Froogle was -- a shopping search engine. If it had been called Google Shopping, take-up might have been better.

Given this, "deemphasizing" Froogle as a destination isn't hard given that few seem to think of it as a destination anyway. Back in July, Hitwise found it ranked ninth among Google top 29 properties -- and sharewise, not that far behind Google Video (0.45 percent of all visitors to the top 20 Google sites went to Froogle versus 0.47 percent going to Google Video).

Google Video's move on to the home page helped that service and hurt Froogle, as Hitwise later notes. But again, sharewise, it was hardly noticeable. Froogle dropped to the 0.02 percent range, while Google Video rose to the 0.06 percent range. In other words, practically no one was going to either service compared to things like Google web search overall.

That's why better integration of all vertical search results into listings will be coming at Google, as well as other search engines. But I hope we will see a renamed Google Shopping service still survive, with a custom home page and URL. Shopping search is important enough that it deserves a standalone brand.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:00 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2006

'Local Shopping' Competition Intensifying

Several years ago I was in a room with Chuck Davis, then CEO of BizRate (Shopzilla), and pitched him the idea of including local, offline store information in the company's database. He cited the complexity of getting the local information and the absence of a competitive need for it at the time. Times have changed and local (together with "social shopping") is the next frontier for comparison engines.

A range of competitors, including NearbyNow, ShopLocal, Yokel, Become, CNET and Froogle (and soon more newspapers), are offering some version of local, offline shopping data and inventory information to consumers. And today Yokel announced expanded local store and inventory information in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here's more information from my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 5:39 PM | Permalink

August 29, 2006

Update On Coupon Shortcut, Yahoo Adds Cheap Shortcut

Last week I told you about Yahoo's new Coupon Shortcut. In that post, I said that the comments on Adam Viener's Revenews post seem to suggest that Coupon Cabin is providing the coupon codes, but Chris Saito of Yahoo! Shopping told me that Yahoo! â€œaggregates coupons/rebates from multiple sources but hasn't released specific partners.â€

When I talked to Chris, he also alerted me to the new 'cheap' shortcut which highlights products which have been marked down in Yahoo! Shopping/Yahoo! Product Submit. Just search for 'cheap [insert product]'. Here are some examples: cheap plasma tv, cheap shirts, cheap jeans.

The cheap shortcut is the latest example of vertical results (shopping) creeping (as Danny would say) into regular search results. If you're a merchant, it's more and more important to market through the shopping comparison engines. If you're not using Yahoo! Product Submit/Yahoo! Shopping, you're missing out on potentially valuable traffic from regular Yahoo! searches. If you're not using Google Base, you're missing out on potentially valuable traffic from regular Google searches. Everyone should be working on search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC), but don't forget to test out the vertical search engines.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:33 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2006

Yahoo Adds Coupon Shortcut, Making Finding Coupons Easy

Adam Viener of ReveNews.com discovered a Yahoo! Shortcut which gives searchers quick and easy access to coupon codes.

Adam highlighted a search for kodak gallery coupon codes. Here are some other examples: circuit city coupon, vistaprint coupon, netflix coupon code, and dell coupon code.

This is a great service for consumers who are spared the trouble of weeding through creatively written sponsored listings and pages of organic listings claiming to have the best coupons and then returning out of date deals. This is also a potential win for Yahoo! as affiliate revenue can add up pretty quickly.

The comments on Adam's post seem to indicate that the coupons are sourced through a third party called Coupon Cabin, but there's no confirmation of that. Last year Yahoo! tested out a different partner for coupons on Yahoo! Shopping.

Posted by Brian Smith at 2:44 AM | Permalink

August 22, 2006

NearbyNow Brings New 'Inventory' To Local Search

The "holy grail" of online shopping is local inventory information. Paradoxical as it may sound I say that because the overwhelming majority of transactions occur in local stores and that isn't going to change any time soon. Though e-commerce is growing fast, growing much faster is the influence of the Internet on offline transactions. Those Internet-influenced local transactions, worth more than $350 billion annually and climbing, typically start online in the form of price comparison shopping or product research.

Yet real-time inventory information has so far been elusive for most shopping sites â€“ even those that offer local information, including ShopLocal, Yokel, Froogle, CNET and Become. All of these, to varying degrees, have local data but most of it is "proxy information" for inventory (i.e., item is normally carried or on special).

A new site called NearbyNow is pulling together real-time POS ("point of sale") inventory information from retailers large and small and presenting it through local-mall portal sites. The first up is for the company is Eastridge Mall in San Jose, Ca. On this site you can search for specific products and sale items. Nothing can be purchased online; it's all about driving people into local stores.

NearbyNow CEO Scott Dunlap says that virtually 100% of inventory is going to be there for all the stores in the mall. For example, here's a search for "kids shoes." I can see every store in the mall that sells kids shoes, the prices and the specific shoes available. It's much more efficient for consumers and the conversion rates for merchants are going to be very, very high. Retailers are also going to get a better sense of how the Internet is directly driving offline sales than from buying general paid-search.

A noteworthy site feature is the "reserve this product" in-store pickup capability (like Circuit City's very successful in-store pickup feature). Every item online can be "reserved" for onsite purchase at the local store. Consumers can be contacted by email or a store clerk to confirm the item is at the store or to otherwise inform them it's not (offering the opportunity to direct consumers to another store that does have the item).

Think about holiday shopping and how efficient this would be. Consumers could do all their local shopping online and then simply go from store to store at the mall picking up and paying for those items.

Another critical dimension of the offering is that NearbyNow is also working with in-mall kiosk vendors to provide the same product search onsite. In other words, a local shopping engine that offers comprehensive, structured data for only the stores in the mall, in the actual mall. NearbyNow has said it will sell contextually relevant or competitive ads on those kiosks (and its mall sites). And one can imagine that as much as the site will drive conversions, those in-mall searches and kiosk ads are going to drive even higher transaction rates.

The kiosk use case is similar to the wireless scenario that everyone has been salivating over for the past couple of years. The idea is that in a wireless context, the consumer is very close in time to a purchase and the need for the product or service is immediate. That's equally true for NeabyNow's mall sites and, even more so, for the in-mall kiosks. But there's the additional opportunity to expose and sell even more stuff to onsite consumers through the kiosks (or to users accessing the site on wireless devices).

Wireless users with smartphones (Motorola Q, Treo, Blackberry, etc.) will be able to perform those same local product searches, whether in transit or at the mall, by accessing the local mall site on their mobile devices. Dunlap said that text messaging is coming (and so are contextually relevant text-based advertising opportunities).

I also spoke to Dunlap about in-store kiosks as another potential layer of this offering â€“ consumers within a Macy's or Bloomingdales search for inventory items and then are exposed to specials or offerings from other departments.

NearbyNow is currently buying paid search to build consumer awareness (driving people to product-specific results pages within the local mall site). But considerable promotion is going on within the local mall. In other words, the mall itself promotes its local shopping portal powered by NearbyNow. This is a highly qualified consumer audience that will likely be eager to use the mall site in the future.

In addition to providing the infrastructure for these local mall sites and kiosks, NearbyNow is in discussions to potentially license its local inventory data to third parties (think shopping engines, local newspapers, directories, etc.). Dunlap wants to do that in a careful way that doesn't promote e-commerce at the expense of the participating retailers. But I would expect NearbyNow's biz dev team to be very busy fairly soon.

I've argued many times in the past that shopping sites and portals will need to include local inventory information or be outflanked by those that eventually do. It's inevitable -- even more so now.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:34 PM | Permalink

August 9, 2006

Sortprice.com - Same Shopping Search, Different User Experience

Yesterday Sortprice put out a press release about being a 'next generation' shopping comparison engine. While I'm not so sure I'd agree with that, the larger players in the industry should pay attention to this little operation.

The press release was partly about a rollover feature allowing consumers to "scan though countless products and view their favorite denim as an enlarged thumbnail without even a click of a button." This is nothing special on its own. And truthfully, I wasn't even going to write a post about it. Become.com launched something similar at the end of May and Smarter.com launched their rollover feature a couple weeks ago.

What's important is that Sortprice and the newer shopping comparison engines are thinking about improving the user experience.

Another example on Sortprice is 'Shop, Drag, and Drop'; the ability to create a non category specific comparison list. For example, a shopper can match a tie, shoes and a jacket. These lists can then be shared with friends. Danny covered this feature in May. Again, nothing revolutionary, but as far as I know, Windows Live Shopping is the only other shopping engine to offer this functionality. Here's another one...at the bottom of each Sortprice shopping search page, there are XML feeds available. And Sortprice didn't just put up an RSS button which most users don't know what to do with, they "chickletized" their site with 'Add to Google', 'Add to My Yahoo!', and 'Add to My MSN' buttons.

Ok, I'll be the first to admit that Sortprice has a long way to go in terms of overall design and user experience, but what's important is that the company is testing things out. Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and NexTag should can learn from Sortprice.

And then there's Sortprice's product listing model. Most of the feed based shopping comparison engines work on a CPC model; every time a shopper clicks on a product listing, a merchant is charged. Sortprice has a completely different model. The company will list a small subset of your products for free and then, as opposed to charging on a click basis, Sortprice has an Enhanced Listing Program in which merchants pay a flat monthly rate. This can be a very attractive alternative to the more established CPC model.

Posted by Brian Smith at 5:59 PM | Permalink

August 3, 2006

Find 'Nearby Stores' With Become

There's lots of data from many sources that reflects the dominant consumer shopping paradigm involving the Internet: research online, buy locally. Even though e-commerce, excluding Travel, will approach $150 billion this year, according to Forrester Research, that's a small fraction of offline spending. But more and more of that offline buying is influenced in one way or another by the Internet.

Among the shopping engines, ShopLocal and Froogle offer local buying information. CNET also has some local inventory information (via Channel Intelligence). Now Become.com has joined that illustrious group with a new "nearby stores" feature.

According to the company:

Launched with over 30,000 retail locations, â€œNearby Storesâ€ listings include dynamic Yahoo! Mapsâ„¢ so shoppers can visually locate the closest merchants . . . To find local merchants, Become.com visitors simply choose the item they want to purchase such as â€œdigital camera,â€ click on the â€œcompare pricesâ€ button and input their zip code. Nearby Stores are indicated on the far right column with a link to detailed store information, including addresses, telephone numbers, hours of operation and maps.

Here's an example details page (thanks to Gary Price). Become will be demonstrating the new feature at the company's booth next week at SES.

Local buying/inventory information will need to be integrated by all the shopping engines over time for them to remain competitive.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 3:49 PM | Permalink

July 24, 2006

Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

No longer do you have to weed through hundreds or thousands of search results to find a discussion forum or product specs for Aston Martin's Vanquish. With Become, you can search for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' or any other product and then filter by Product Reveiws, Buying Guides, Discussion Forums, and Product Details.

As Jon Glick, Become's Sr. Director of Product Search told me, "users can see what type of listing it is before going into it." I think this is an extremely useful feature. My original search results for 'Aston Martin Vanquish' (yes, I'm obsessed) contained 171, 573 results vs. the 51 returns for discussion forums (which I really wanted). This is a search engine starting to answer my questions as opposed to just returning a bunch of irrelevant results.

So how does this work? Jon immediately went over my head in his explanation (all of you know how sophomoric my tech undertanding is), but here's what I was able to grok. The 4 month project started with human input to define the parameters for a buying guide or discussion forum (a buying guide has characteristics X, Y, and Z while a discussion forum has characteristics D, R, Q, and Y). Then the machine learning takes over, looking at each and every page that Become.com crawls to try to put it in a bucket. But this has to be done in an efficient manner balancing precision and recall and this has to be done for all 4 filters. And then there's the added issue that one web page can be both a product review and product detail page (think Amazon's product pages). As a marketer, I have no idea how difficult this is to pull off, but it didn't sound easy and I don't see many other companies with a similar feature set.

What immediately came to mind when Jon explained Search Zoom was Kosmix's filtering and personalization options. Kosmix also crawls the web, searching over 3.2b pages, and has what I'd consider advanced filtering options. The company also looks at individual web pages, not just the website as a whole.

So if I find the results from Become's Search Zoom so helpful, why don't the general search engines do this? Jon explained "If you’re a general purpose search engine, you can’t have 30 buttons across the top. As a vertical search engine, we just wanted to limit the choices to the decisions that people who need to make a buying decision need. We have a more constrained problem. We can help people in ways that Google as a general search engine can't."

With Search Zoom, Become has an extremely useful and easy to understand product which it should try to syndicate. As I mentioned last week in reference to Zillow's partnership with Yahoo!, biz dev deals are an attractive alternative to spending millions on the PPC engines. First on the biz dev list should be Shopping.com. Become is syndicating Shopping.com's price comparison listings to supplement its own...there's already a relationship. Shopping.com recently added a 'Buying Guides' section. This could be 227x better with Become's assistance.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:00 PM | Permalink

Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:00 PM | Permalink

Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:00 PM | Permalink

Become.com Launches Search Zoom Filtering Feature

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:00 PM | Permalink

July 19, 2006

Can IAC's Pronto Shopping Search Compete?

IAC, parent of search engine Ask.com, has had a shopping search tool for some time, in the form of Pronto, a downloadable application. Recently, IAC created a web-based version of Pronto, which has some useful features—but it joins a crowded field with hundreds of other players. SEW correspondent Brian Smith takes a look at Pronto and muses about the challenges it faces in today's SearchDay article, Up Close with IAC's Pronto Shopping Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Can IAC's Pronto Shopping Search Compete?

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Can IAC's Pronto Shopping Search Compete?

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:11 PM | Permalink

Can IAC's Pronto Shopping Search Compete?

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 1:11 PM | Permalink

July 7, 2006

Google Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines

Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I’m not sure they’ll stand for it.

The shopping comparison engines are some of the biggest purchasers of pay per click (PPC) listings on Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM). Companies like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and NexTag are also some of the savviest search marketers in the biz, looking at revenue derived from each and every click. Whether you call it arbitrage or not, many of the shopping comparison engines purchase keywords to drive traffic to their sites and then monetize that traffic through their own PPC listings, ideally at a higher rate than what they paid Google or Yahoo!.

As PPC rates on the general search engines have risen over the last couple years, the shopping comparison engines have had to raise their own PPC rates to cover their increased costs. A number of people I trust say that this is faulty logic, but I would say that the rise in PPC costs on the general search engines is definitely one factor in the rise in PPC rates on the shopping comparison engines.

Google Adwords ranks PPC ads “based on their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score on Google.com. (For the top positions above Google search results, we use the actual CPC.) The Quality Score is determined by the keyword’s performance history on Google: its clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, landing page quality, and other relevancy factors.” (Full Explanation).

Now here comes Google Checkout. If you’re an AdWords advertiser, you can hook up your Adwords and Checkout accounts and display a Google Checkout shopping cart icon in your Adwords ads. If Google Checkout takes off, consumers will start to look for ads that have the Checkout icon, thus driving up the CTR of these ads. Because CTR is one determinant of ranking on Adwords, the merchants who list the icon should move up in ranking.

The comparison engines will not be able to show the Google Checkout shopping cart icon in their listings (unless some special deal is struck). This means that to effectively compete with the merchants who are displaying the icon, the shopping comparison engines will have to increase their maximum CPC bid, driving up costs.

If the shopping comparison engines are paying more on Google Adwords, they are going to have to raise the minimum price floors they charge merchants. Merchants are already pissed at the perceived high costs on the shopping comparison engines (I say perceived because I don’t think that all advertisers are properly tracking costs or optimizing listings and therefore could actually afford to bid a lot higher) so rate increases are always met with disdain.

Most of the large shopping comparison engines will increase their pricing in preparation for the holiday season. This is a normal phenomenon because conversion rate goes up during the holiday shopping season, but I think the engines also raise their rates to cover their own click costs. Now add the Google Checkout factor and shopping comparison engines might have to raise their rates even more.

To see a sample of what the Google Checkout shopping cart icon looks like in an AdWords ad, see my full Google Checkout post.

Posted by Brian Smith at 11:32 AM | Permalink

Google Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines

Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I’m not sure they’ll stand for it.

To see a sample of what the Google Checkout shopping cart icon looks like in an AdWords ad, see my full Google Checkout post.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:32 AM | Permalink

Google Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines

Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I’m not sure they’ll stand for it.

To see a sample of what the Google Checkout shopping cart icon looks like in an AdWords ad, see my full Google Checkout post.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:32 AM | Permalink

Google Checkout Could Increase Costs For The Shopping Comparison Engines

Google Checkout adoption will translate to higher costs for the shopping comparison engines. Some of the costs will be passed onto merchants, and I’m not sure they’ll stand for it.

To see a sample of what the Google Checkout shopping cart icon looks like in an AdWords ad, see my full Google Checkout post.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:32 AM | Permalink

July 6, 2006

Smarter.com Updates Site

Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling.

While Smarter is one of the little guys in the shopping comparison engine industry (Shopping.com and Shopzilla being the leaders according to comScore data), these are bold moves which show how serious the company is about becoming a major player.

The clustering Smarter is working on isn’t revolutionary, but it’s a pretty significant leap forward for the company. And if it’s true that some other shopping comparison engines do this type of work through cheap manual labor in other countries, then it’s a big deal.

Check out this search for 'women's sunglasses' as an example.

As opposed to just Brand, Store, and Price Range, you can now filter by Frame Color, Frame Material, Lens Color, Lens Material, Lens Shape, Sunglasses Shape, and Sunglasses Type. This is an incredible improvement that makes searching for sunglasses online pretty much like searching for sunglasses at your local Sunglass Hut.

Read more, including an interview with Smarter.com Co-founder Harry Tsao, at ComparisonEngines.com.

Posted by Brian Smith at 5:29 PM | Permalink

Smarter.com Updates Site

Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling.

Check out this search for 'women's sunglasses' as an example.

Read more, including an interview with Smarter.com Co-founder Harry Tsao, at ComparisonEngines.com.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 5:29 PM | Permalink

Smarter.com Updates Site

Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling.

Check out this search for 'women's sunglasses' as an example.

Read more, including an interview with Smarter.com Co-founder Harry Tsao, at ComparisonEngines.com.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 5:29 PM | Permalink

Smarter.com Updates Site

Smarter.com made 4 major changes to its website. The company introduced a new design, new ranking methodology, clustering beta, and limited crawling.

Check out this search for 'women's sunglasses' as an example.

Read more, including an interview with Smarter.com Co-founder Harry Tsao, at ComparisonEngines.com.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 5:29 PM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

ShopWiki Launches Search By Color

ShopWiki this morning launched its 'Search by Color' feature which lets consumers quickly and easily filter search results by color. From the press release: Accessible on ShopWiki's search results page, the Search by Color tool displays more than 50,000 RGB colors for shoppers to choose from. A shopper looking for a turquoise v-neck shirt, for example, can search "women's v-neck" then select the desired shade from the color tool. Once selected, the search results are instantly updated to list those shirts available in the chosen hue.

You have to play around with Shop by Color to really understand the power of this feature.

Expect to see more innovative features like this out of Shopwiki soon. Read my ComparisonEngines.com post to put this new feature in perspective.

Posted by Brian Smith at 11:43 AM | Permalink

ShopWiki Launches Search By Color

You have to play around with Shop by Color to really understand the power of this feature.

Expect to see more innovative features like this out of Shopwiki soon. Read my ComparisonEngines.com post to put this new feature in perspective.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:43 AM | Permalink

ShopWiki Launches Search By Color

You have to play around with Shop by Color to really understand the power of this feature.

Expect to see more innovative features like this out of Shopwiki soon. Read my ComparisonEngines.com post to put this new feature in perspective.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:43 AM | Permalink

ShopWiki Launches Search By Color

You have to play around with Shop by Color to really understand the power of this feature.

Expect to see more innovative features like this out of Shopwiki soon. Read my ComparisonEngines.com post to put this new feature in perspective.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:43 AM | Permalink

June 12, 2006

Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site

Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site.

I'm not sure about THE N9NE, but according to Chris Saito [thanks for the quick response!] Trovetopia turns out to be a "test bed for [Yahoo!] APIs – it’s built entirely using the web services available on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

It's cool to see Yahoo playing around with its own APIs. Yahoo Tech is another place to see the power of the APIs. Considering that I get an email each week about people interested in using a shopping comparison engine API, it's smart to put these services on display.

Posted by Brian Smith at 9:48 AM | Permalink

Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site

Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:48 AM | Permalink

Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site

Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:48 AM | Permalink

Trovetopia - Yahoo Shopping Test Bed Site

Gary Price at ResourceShelf noticed that Yahoo registered two trademarks: "Trovetopia" and "THE N9NE," with Trovetopia also being the name of an active Yahoo shopping site.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:48 AM | Permalink

June 7, 2006

Yahoo! Shopping Launches Blog

Chris Saito announced the launch of the Yahoo! Shopping Blog at Internet Retailer 2006 yesterday.

While I wasn't at the conference, Chris filled me in, saying the blog is a great way to merchandise products, drive engagement (subscribe through RSS, build loyalty, etc.), and drive transactions. The blog will get more promotion on Yahoo! Shopping over time. There will be 4-5 people contributing (David Beach and Joe Lazarus have each contributed thus far).

In the inaugural post, Beach explained “The Yahoo! Shopping Blog does not allow advertisers or sponsors to influence editorial decisions in the creation of blog posts. We just like to find good things so you can find them too.” Today's find? The Skyrail Marble Roller Coaster.

Last week I wrote about the opportunity for shoppin