Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

Jellyfish smack+eBay = zeedive.com

Over on eBay Strategies we have a post about zeeDive.  Not a CSE per-se, but it takes elements of the Jellyfish Smack we've been addicted to here in CSE Strategy-land and combines them in an interest multi-seller "multi-smack" kind.

November Comscore data is out for CSE - A battle for #1, and a new contender!

The November Comscore data (to the right)  is out for CSEs and there's some interesting movement to discuss.  First from a macro perspective two important datapoints:

1. 67m of 173m total audience members visited CSEs - That's 39% (up from 32% last year).
2. The CSE category is growing 14% y/y as far as audience (we're seeing clicks/leads and GMV grow much faster than this 14% audience growth which indicates that more and more consumers are shopping and buying via CSEs.

Now looking at specific companies there's lots of interesting datapoints:

• Shopping.com and Shopzilla continue to duke it out for the number 1 spot.  Shopping.com won in November, but in October, Shopzilla commanded the largest audience.
• Looking at growth rates you see Shopzilla growing a good bit faster (16.7% y/y) compared to Shopping.com (5.1% y/y) which indicates that Shopzilla is either spending more with search or benefiting from Scripps integration, or a mix of both.
• Speaking of growth rates, SHAZAM, check out Mezi Media!  They lead the growth rate with 313% y/y growth. which has rocketed them into the top 10 with a bullet.  Many of you ma be scratching your head saying, "Mezi what?".  Mezi was founded by two ex-Overture alumni (that were actually involved in the acquisition of our last company as fate would have it) and they have very cleverely created a network of shopping-oriented sites they are now integrating.  Smarter.com, CouponMountain and MoreRebates.  Hey number 1-7, you guys better keep an eye on Mezi, when they integrate these sites they are going to be able to do some things you are only dreaming of right now.
• At the bottom of the growth pile is Nextag with a y/y decline of -10.9%.  Ouch.  I can only speculate, but my guess is that the focus on mortgage and travel at Nextag has confused consumers and they are not going there for general product searches any more.
• Finally, Shoplocal has seen a great climb, but is is sustainable?  I personally only use the service for the TMX, Wii, PS3 kinds of searches. 

CSE readers, what do you think about the data?  does this match what you see on the revenue/gmv side of things?  CSE engines - do you believe ComScore or do you believe they are under/overcounting your share?

               

Google Checkout - Free through 2007!

WOW!  Google just announced on the Google Checkout Blog that they are going to extend the free payment processing that was live for the holidays through the end of 2007.  Yes, a complete YEAR of free payment processing.  This is huge from a merchant's perspective as this essentially drops 2% into their pockets they can either, well, pocket or pump back into Google Adwords.

“Earlier this month, we announced that we were processing all Google Checkout sales for free until the end of 2006. Since then, we’ve had such a positive response from merchants that we decided to extend the offer through the end of 2007. From now through December 31, 2007, we’ll process all of your Checkout transactions for free.”

WOW!  Google just announced on the Google Checkout Blog that they are going to extend the free payment processing that was live for the holidays through the end of 2007.  Yes, a complete YEAR of free payment processing.  This is huge from a merchant's perspective as this essentially drops 2% into their pockets they can either, well, pocket or pump back into Google Adwords.

“Earlier this month, we announced that we were processing all Google Checkout sales for free until the end of 2006. Since then, we’ve had such a positive response from merchants that we decided to extend the offer through the end of 2007. From now through December 31, 2007, we’ll process all of your Checkout transactions for free.”

A little CSE with your morning news and colorful graphs...

Today, PriceGrabber (shown on the left in their festive holiday adornments) announced that they will be providing a private-label shopping experience for the USA Today.com online newspaper reading crowd.  There's a growing trend with the PriceGrabber's, Smarter's and Beyond's to re-skin their system and integrate it with an organic traffic source.  I think this is one of the smartest ways to hedge against possible issues with the search engines down the road.  It's never  a good idea to have too much of your business reliant on one channel.  This is true if you are a CSE OR a retailer...

Valueclick buys thorn in Shopping.com's side - shopping.net

In the UK, you type in shopping.co.uk, expecting to see Shoppy and instead you are taken to Shopping.net. Today Valueclick (owner of PriceRunner.com), announced they are acquiring shopping.net for $13.3m.  Shopping.net's revenues are in the $4m/yr range.  That's a lot of cash for a relatively unknown player.  Although I do dig their '80's style pixely shopping cart in the logo.

Next wave of CSEs (dare I say CSE 2.0?) getting some press - Jellyfish, TheFind, MyTriggers...

Bob Tedeshi @ NYT (free sub required) has a good piece on the next generation of CSEs highlighting MyTriggers (CEO scored a Glam Shot with some Elmos+Wiis).  The angle of the piece is that as per-clicks get more expensive, retailers will want a per sale (or per action - CPA) model.  MyTriggers comes out swinging on that.

The article also hits on the fact that there's the potential for better selection with the JellyFish, Pronto, MyTriggers, theFind CSE2.0 folks because they don't only include those merchants that pay and/or the CPA model is more inclusive. 

For example, Victoria's secret won't do CPC because they get so many clicks sans purchases the economics of CSE don't and won't work for them.  CPA would be a better solution.

There's also an interesting data point from comScore I wanted to punch on and will be tracking closely here at CSE Strategies:

“This is still a growing category,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks, which tracks Internet use. According to Mr. Fulgoni, comparison shopping sites added eight million users from October 2005 to October 2006, a 14 percent jump. But the 62 million people who used shopping comparison sites in October represented little more than a third of the nation’s online population of 173 million."

The article makes the fact that 62m out of 173m consumers go to CSEs (36%) as small, but I think that's larger than most retailers think about today.  Most retailers I talk to see CSE as a 10-15% kind of a focus so it's interesting to see it's over 1/3 and climbing.  I imagine thanks to the proliferation of CSE 1.0, 2.0 and projects like Google Base, we'll see this number creep up to 50% over the next 12-24 months.

In any case, congrats to the CSE 2.0 guys for great coverage at the perfect time of year.  What did the CSE 1.0 guys have to say?  I'll leave you, as the NYT article does, with this perplexing quote from Shopzilla's Farhad Mohit:

“I thought cost-per-click would destroy our company, but customers are very accepting of it,” he said. “And it allows us to make money.”

The CSE Gospel According to Pronto/IAC's Dan Marriott

I remember the first time I met Dan, within 20 minutes we started completing each other's sentences.   When they started working on Pronto, we wanted to support the effort not only with datafeeds, but also by plugging our SMB/eBay customers directly into the system.  This article on ZDNET came out over the weekend and captures some of Dan's comments at the Kelsey Interactive Local Media conference.

Dan has an innate ability to make complex markets seem like a board game and then uses that ability to eloquently show how IAC is positioned on that board game.  For example, he says:

"Pronto is a “web crawler.” Marriott identified new styles of services competing in the online comparison shopping space:

 

• Decision support: Mpire.com
• Occasion-based: Gifts.com (also IAC)
• Demographically targeted: Glam
• Community minded:  Kaboodle
• Web 2.0 tools: Stylehive
• Visual search: Like.com
• Consumer incented: Jellyfish.com

 

All are vying for their piece of a very large online shopping opportunity: $250 billion plus, according to Marriott. Online spending on goods is currently about $132 billion and online influences additionally about $126 billion in offline sales, Marriott said.

 

According to Marriott, aggregated “targeted shopping services” are only capturing about $1 billion of the market."

Talk to most VCs about the industry and they make it seem like it's game over, the money has been made, but here Dan makes a strong case that we're in the first inning of comparison shopping systems. 

Bottom line: Keep a close eye on Pronto, they have a very solid team and significant backing. 

Sound off: CSE readers - what do you think?  Are we in the early days of CSE or the 9th inning?

Note to Shopzilla: it's BCC.... (or SpamZilla?)

Several readers have reported about an ongoing customer communication situation (soon to be crisis?) over at Shopzilla.  Here's the sequence of events:

1. 11/30 - Shopzilla Merchant Services, szmerchservices@Shopzilla.com, sends email to about 250 customers about errors in reporting from 11/18-11/20. Excerpt:

       

"Due to a technical issue, we were unable to capture and record your order and sales data for the time period of November 18 through November 20, 2006. To prevent your conversion and cost of sale data from being inaccurate in the Performance Report on the Shopzilla Merchant Services Website,  we have removed the corresponding cost and click data from the Performance Report for these three days.  To view click and cost data for
this time period, please refer to the Cost Report.   "

2.  Whoever sent this email out cc'ed (yes CC'ed) all 250 customers in the open with complete email addresses.

3. (Note: if you've ever been on an email like this you know where it's going).  Someone naturally hits "reply to all" and says "hey why did you cc everyone,  protect my privacy", "stop emailing me!", "unsubscribe", "everyone STOP HITTING REPLY-ALL!", "really stop", "please?", "help..."

4. About 20-30 messages like this spin around, gathering speed and ferocity.

5. Conversation degrades into a: "Hey did all of you merchants know Shopzilla does X and Y and make sure to check your bill for Z.  Accusations like this start to fly:

Is Shopzilla buying 1-5 cent click leads and charging us upwards of 75
cents per click?  Based on the 90% drop in our ROI and the depletion of
our 5 day spend money in 1 day leads us to believe they are trying to
maximise their revenue and profits at OUR EXPENSE.

So far the story stops here, but we're really only 2 days into the situation so it will be interesting to see what happens next.  Will Shopzilla step in and formally apologize?  Will they in some way compensate all of these customers whose inboxes are now overflowing with unsolicited  emails?  Will they be forced to address the allegations beginning to swirl around?  Stay tuned CSE Strategies readers, we'll keep you posted.