Comparison Shopping Engines @ ChannelAdvisor Catalyst UK

Scot Wingo here.  I'm over in the UK (London) for our ChannelAdvisor Catalyst UK event and we held an interesting panel on CSEs.

In my keynote, I pointed out that based on Comscore data, about 35% of buyers in the EU go through a CSE on a monthly basis.  In the UK, this is quite a bit higher at over 50%.

The panel was hosted by our UK CSE expert, Dan Burnham and featured:

• Adam Patterson, Shopzilla
• Laurent Gibb, Shopping.com
• Thomas Sevege, Twenga

Shopzilla

Shopzilla is active in UK, FR, DE.  They reviewed a timeline of the company that most are familiar with.  In EU, they have 6m visitors/m and in the UK approx 3m uniques/m.

The Shopzilla differences are:

• Speed - 10-50x faster than competitors
  • No ads
• Relevance
  • ShopRank determines most relevant results, not just based on price.
• Ratings (consumer ratings)

They highlighted non-compacted products and how shopzilla does on these items.  Specifically they pull out a variety of attributes.  Used the example of women's jeans.

Shopzilla has a bid-driven interface (merchants love this - we can attest to this).  He also highlighted their account management function.

Shopping.com
Highlighted their distribution network.  Their Catalogue is part of their key differentiator.  They have over 100 people in Isreal actively building the catalog.  He also talked about ratings.

Twenga
Twenga is a new CSE in the UK market.  They have gotten some pretty good traction.  They are only 18 months old.

They are in 11 countries with 30k active members.  Tehy have 60m offers and 90,000 product catalogs.  They claim 12m visits.

They have a mixed crawler/feed model (all inclusive vs. pay only).  It's indexed with TwengaBOC (smart cataloguing).  These products are displayed with Twenga's Clustering algorithm.

Thus their value proposition is:

• For buyers:
  • All merchants - largest selection
  • Finds the right product, at the right price.
• For merchants:
  • CPA model - pay only when something sells
  • Traffic

Here's an example of a search on Twenga.

Comparison Shopping Engines in the UK and Europe

In the EU and specifically the UK, CSEs are even more prevalent, fragmented and strategic than the US.  Here is some data I reviewed in my keynote:

First, here is some Comscore trends and data on CSEs in all of Europe:

Note that 34.7% of internet users visit a CSE in Europe.  Also note that Twenga (CSE 2.0) came on the market with 4m uniques placing them into the top 10 very quickly.  Also, one thing to note as they are coming to the US is that Ciao enjoys the number one spot ahead of many of the CSE 1.0 players like shopping.com and shopzilla.

Second, here is the same Comscore data, but from a UK perspective:

In the UK, note that Shopping.com holds the top spot, but Ciao is right on its heels.  Also of particular interest is that 51.4% of the internet audience (online shoppers) in the UK  visit a CSE on a monthly basis.  So UK buyers are much stronger users of CSEs than both the rest of EU and the US.

Comments

[Michal Jaskolski / Nokaut.pl]

Nokaut.pl results are missing from Comscore CSE EU stats.

According to PBI/Megapanel data (main panel stats in Poland, similar to Comscore), we had 1.9 mln UU in January 2008. Ceneo.pl had around 2.4 mln.

In January 2007, we had only 0.36 mln UU, so 2007 was a busy year for us.