Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

CyberMonday - BOOYOW!!

We had our biggest CSE GMV day on CyberMonday and this report out from ComScore indicates that CyberMonday topped $600m in GMV - a 26% lift over last year.

But wait, it gets better - historically CM is the START of the online holiday season and we peak in the 12/11-12/18 timeframe.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think the ecommerce forecasts showing 20% growth are going to turn out to be too conservative when we look  back at 2006-2008 timeframe.

Here's the details from ComScore - CSE Strategies readers, how was your Monday!? Comment below...

New CSE Du Jour - PriceShaker.com

There's a steady stream of new CSEs hitting the streets and we're going to try and keep up with the newbies here at CSE Strategies.

Today we learned about PriceShaker.com from this press release. 
I put the Freshman PriceShaker through it's paces and well let's just say these guys have some work in front of them:

• Elmo search - F - where's everyone's favorite red monster?
• Stephen King - F - zero results? These guys have a book category... Hmm...
• Canon Elph - D - If a CSE can't do this one given the popularity of digital cameras, they are DONE.  Fortunately there are results here.  The D score is due to the fact that the results are not very strong.  The first item they show is a waterproof camera?  Then if you drill into one of the models like a SD500, the results page feels like a 1998 pre-mysimon kind of effort.  There are some review capabilities and what not, but the result set is pretty weak compared to this.

Bottom Line:  Welcome to the industry PriceShaker, you guys need to spend a lot more time on this puppy before you shake up the  CSE world.

Checkout Wars Article.

Over on eBay Strategies I posted an article with an update on PayPal vs. Google Checkout.  It used to be the case that CSE oriented readers didn't really care, but given shopping.com and shop.com's use of a unified checkout, I think it's safe to say the Checkout Wars have spilled over into CSE land so some of you maybe interested in that article.  Highlights:

• Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott reports that the market share of visits to Checkout was up 158% in the days after Thanksgiving. But more impressive, PayPal suddenly isn't so far ahead.
• "While it still has a long way to go to catch Paypal in terms of visits, Paypal's lead was cut in half in just one week: last week I reported that Paypal's market share was 96X Google Checkout for the week ending 11/18/06 - this week Paypal was 38X Google Checkout in terms of market share."

Black Friday/Cyber Monday News roundup and real-world results.

Wow have the servers been humming at ChannelAdvisor for the last week.  We had a killer Black Friday and then yesterday's CyberMonday topped that in many ways.  I'll get into some details on that in a second.  But first, some interesting news tidbits came out over the last week I wanted to make sure CSE fans knew about:

• Reuters had a good Black Friday roundup with two CSE interesting tidbits:
  
  • "Shopping.com and Price Grabber.com, which allow consumers to compare deals from a variety of retailers, saw year-over-year jumps of 40 percent and 45 percent, respectively, in the volume of traffic on their sites."

  • Shopping.com Chief Executive Josh Silverman said the highest-growth categories in November so far were household goods and clothing, not electronics, which include hot items like plasma TVs and game consoles.

    "Where three or four years ago it was younger males buying electronics, now more than half of our shoppers are women and the most popular categories online look a whole lot like the most popular categories offline," Silverman said.

         Electronics saw 16-percent year-over-year growth for November to date.

• Comparison shopping engine (CSE for you home players) traffic is up 21% y/y on Black Friday according to Comscore.
• Some interesting ecomm data from comscore:
  • According to raw data from comScore Networks released this morning, US consumers spent nearly $2 billion online in just the past week alone. For the month of November leading up to last Friday, consumers spent $8.31 billion - a 24% jump over 2005. Black Friday spending, according to comScore, rose 42% over the prior year. While comScore does not generate forecasts, a simple linear analysis based on its data would indicate that, if this trend holds out, US consumers could spend another $2.74 billion just this week, resulting in a huge "Cyber Monday" for retailers.

I'm sure we'll see more as the Holiday shopping season continues and we'll keep you posted.

Now for some real-world results.  At ChannelAdvisor we're on track to double the $1B in GMV that went through our various solutions (marketplace/cse/search) this year.   While we've doubled our client count, we're seeing a fair amount of y/y growth in "same stores".

Here are two charts I thought you would find interesting.  The first shows our CSE GMV since the start of October through Cyber Monday:

Notice last year how we had a less pronounced BF/CM spike/trough/spike.  this year CM really juiced for us.

Now how did CSE do against GMV driven by paid-search?  Well interesting enough, paid-search was bigger on BF than CM.   Here's that chart:

Here you see a much bigger BF spike and then a subsequent CM spike, but not as big as the BF spike.

Conference call tomorrow (Tues) - CyberMonday Review with Bear Stearns...

I wanted to let all of the CSE Strategies readers know about a conference call I'm participating in with Bob Peck @ Bear Stearns.  Cyber Monday is the topic of the call which is broad and I'm sure in addition to ecommerce, ebay, google checkout, etc. we'll be touching on CSEs as well.

Bob graciously cleared readers of the blog to attend.  Here are the details - I hope you are able to make it!

^{Dial In 800-683-1535 (domestic); 973-633-6740 (int'l); Passcode# 8155568}

^{Replay: 1-877-519-4471 (domestic); 973-341-3080 (int'l); pin#: 8155568}

 

Topics to be Addressed:

The Impact of Cyber Monday on eCommerce

Who Were The Prime Beneficiaries of Cyber Monday

Current Trends on the eBay Platform

The Direction of Conversion Rates and ASPs on eBay

The Role of The Pure Search Engines in eCommerce

How are the Shopping Search Engines Helping Drive Growth

Amazon Webstores

Adoption of Google Checkout

Current Views on PayPal

   

^{Dial In 800-683-1535 (domestic); 973-633-6740 (int'l); Passcode# 8155568}

^{Replay: 1-877-519-4471 (domestic); 973-341-3080 (int'l); pin#: 8155568}

 

Topics to be Addressed:

The Impact of Cyber Monday on eCommerce

Who Were The Prime Beneficiaries of Cyber Monday

Current Trends on the eBay Platform

The Direction of Conversion Rates and ASPs on eBay

The Role of The Pure Search Engines in eCommerce

How are the Shopping Search Engines Helping Drive Growth

Amazon Webstores

Adoption of Google Checkout

Current Views on PayPal

Shopzilla Survey pits women vs. men in online shopping arena

What is it ecommerce survey day?  Earlier today, I reported on the shopping.com survey.  Now Shopzilla/Bizrate has a survey out today too.  This one is more gender focused and thankfully lacks any mention of fruitcake.

Industry insights -- Women vs. Men:

• 48% of men feel anxious, inadequate, confused or aggravated about buying holiday gifts.
• 56% of women are excited about holiday shopping and chomping at the bit.
• Women (36%) are more likely than men (22%) shop throughout the year.
• Men (15%) are more likely than women (5%) to last-minute shop
• Women (44%) are more likely than men (39%) to shop with friends and family
• Men (36% spend over $250)  on gifts for significant others.  Women - only 20% would spend that much.

Industry insights -- online shopping:

• Over 35% say they do most of their holiday shopping online.
• 31% still favor the mall and
• 3% still prefer a catalog
• Men and Women are equally as likely (87%) to buy gifts online
• Top reasons for buying online:
  • 24/7 shopping (83%)
  • Save time (83%)
  • Avoid crowds (72%)
  • Save money (56%)
  • Product research (50%)
  • Gift wrapping and shipping (16%)

Methodology:

• point-of sale survey
• 1,905 online buyers from Sept 18 through September 25th

Interesting Shopping.com survey results (and fruitcake?)

This morning shopping.com is out with the results of  their holiday shopping survey.  The survey has a mix of interesting industry data/insights and somewhat unusual questions.

Industry insights:

•       Respondents said they have an average of six shopping Web sites stored       in their Web browsers
• 46% stated they would start shopping before Thanksgiving (our data is supporting this)
• 22% said they would start after Tgiving
• 20% identified themselves as last-minute shoppers (put me in that bucket)

Unusual data (aka the fruitcake questions):

• 35% of respondents said they would give up alcohol for a three-day-weekend every week.
• 29% said they would give up junk-food for that mythical three-day-weekend.
• 47% said they would immediately throw away a fruitcake gift
• 11% said they would take time and regift that delicious fruitcake

Methodology

• Zoomerang contacted 1,850 online shoppers
• 70% were female
• Ages were 22-42
• 61% married

Finally if you are in the mood today for a little (more) fruitcake humor, checkout this cartoon.

MSN Shopping adds coupons...

MSN Shopping will be introducing coupons shortly, powered by bargainbetty (a Downtown Ecommerce Partners company).   The integration of online coupons and CSEs has been fortold for a long time and it will be interesting to see the MSN+Betty combo and compare it to other implementations (e.g. Smarter.com's owner Mezi also owns CouponMountain and has integrated the two).

Shopping.com partners with Zafu.com for JeanFinder

Shopping.com has added a pretty nifty new feature for buying jeans - the JeanFinder (powered by Zafu.com).

“The women’s jeans market has exploded in recent years, offering shoppers an abundance of styles and brands and making it much harder for women to find that perfect pair,” says Shannon Clouston, chief shopper for Shopping.com."

I tried the wizard out and the weirdest part is the wishlist (guys this gives you some insights into how Women shop for jeans...). The wishlist items are too PG-13 to list here, but let's just say, I wasn't aware booty-licious was a blue-jean attribute.




Not sure how they quantitatively match these needs....

SMACK a Jellyfish!?

Brian Wiegand and the folks at jellyfish.com have really created a stir (congrats on the big PR guys) with their reverse auction concept called Smack shopping (a smack is evidently what you call a group of jellyfish).

The way it works is they start with X units of a hot item and then start dropping the price.  The price drops until all of the units are sold.  You pay full price for the item to the designated retailer, then you get rebate jellyfish $ in your account.  Those funds are "on hold" until you are past the return timeframe (typically 60 days).  Interesting concept and it sure is generating buzz.

Here are some examples of past smacks:

• Xbox 360 - Someone in Madison (hey isn't that where Jellyfish is located?) was able to get the product for about 50% off.  Good luck ever getting that kind of a discount on an XB360 anywhere else.
• ipod Nano - Here, someone from Madison (hey what the heck) was able to get the product for 41% off!

It was interesting watching the buzz on this spread.  It started with Techcrunch and then from there, it was  here and here and here and here (and the list goes on).

How are they paying for this?  Well, they just raised some cash from VCs, so I suspect a good share of that is going to fund Smack. I'll try and interview Brian for a future post.