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