TheFind and PayPal team up
TheFind and PayPal made an interesting move today at midnight -- a co-branded shopping search engine that uncovers products from merchants who use PayPal.
As with TheFind's basic engine, merchants (automatically included) in the co-branded engine don't pay to be listed on the CSE, don't pay CPA fees and don't require a revenue share of any kind. PayPal takes its cut solely from processing fees and TheFind draws revenue from ads.
Why is this interesting?
- TheFind just added 50 million products from 200 million stores, in addition to its existing catalog of 175 million products from half a million stores
- It reveals a new monetization / traffic driver angle for TheFind: partnering to offer unique engine results -- imagine an engine that searched solely for Louis Vuitton handbags or American Express merchants or FedEx shippers...
- It's a much better alternative for discovering PayPal-enabled merchants than PayPal's own directory, and is really the only engine I know of that searches exclusively PayPal retailers
- Google Checkout dominates Google search results and this is one strategy for PayPal to drive more traffic through its payment processing gateways; TheFind benefits by associating with a trusted brand and listing more products
In a related post, Scot wrote back this March that TheFind may be the fastest-growing "second-gen" CSE.
BTW I will be at eBay Live Thursday - Friday. Drop me a line. We can hang out.
Written by Scott Hurff. scott.hurff at channeladvisor dot com
