Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

Boba Fett + CSE = Bountii

I'm always a sucker for attention-getting Star Wars references.

But Bountii's co-founder John Puskarich also caught my attention and this CSE is worthy of yours.  The site has some key differentiators:

• For certain products, Bountii will pay people to find lower prices. There is a set bounty for specific products, and users can make as much cash as the number of deals they find.
• They display "Click to See" and "Add to Cart" prices that are often left out of the feeds sellers send to shopping engines.
• Products that have coupons and rebates have these deals reflected in the price, instead of being handpicked and possibly subjected to bias.
• Pricing information is always displayed, no matter what the seller pays Bountii. Further, the number of stores is intentionally limited to reputable sellers delivering a quality experience.  (One example is Costco -- Bountii is the only CSE on which their results are displayed).

I'm impressed with the site's design approach -- clean, simple and direct.  There isn't much to distract a visitor from their core purpose -- finding the lowest price.  John tells me that they've gotten a lot of feedback saying exactly this.

One challenge I see, though, is visibility and driving enough traffic to make this material.  John told me that they've experienced healthy traffic growth from their widgets, which allows people on eBay and Craigslist to emphasize the quality of their price.  This particular widget shows real-time price updates, pulling from Bountii's product listings.  Repeat visitor traffic is also growing steadily, he said.

Bountii is based upon an affiliate model.  John was quick to point out that no stores get preferential product placement in search results. Pricing information is obtained from merchants' sites and complemented with data from product feeds.

 

The company is a Y Combinator (an early-stage startup fund founded by Viaweb / Yahoo! Stores creator Paul Graham) startup based in Boston and led John and co-founder Samir Meghani.

written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

Interesting new CSE - mydeco.com (UK-based)

Today at ChannelAdvisor's Catalyst UK event, a new CSE was mentioned in the Q+A that I thought was particularly innovative.  The site is called mydeco.com (it's a UK site so don't be surprised to see all prices in pounds).

What's neat about mydeco, is that similar to like.com in the US, it's a very visually-driven CSE, but with the added twist of focusing on the furniture vertical.

By focusing on furniture, mydeco allows a consumer to build a room using the CSE.  So you can create a quick 3D model of your room and then 'place' products from the search results into the room.  Here's an example created by a mydeco user.  Note how the products used to build this room are clearly listed, so not only is it a way for you to have a custom experience, but there's a social element where you can share designs and then as a buyer you can browse different designs and pick out elements that you particularly enjoy/like.

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.

E-consultancy's CSE Buyer's Guide 2008

The fine team at E-consultancy just published one heck of a comprehensive guide to CSEs for sellers who want to know more about the market, who the players are (profiles of 16 leading engines included) and investigates how new players are trying to differentiate themselves just as the old guard seeks to prevent stagnant growth.

E-Consultancy also predicts that the growth of new social shopping sites will be "significant."

And, despite the specter of a complex and difficult global economic situation, a poll of players in the CSE space reveals that there is little worry of an online purchasing slowdown.

Weighted towards the UK market but relevant for everyone selling or playing in the CSE space, I'd recommend you download and read it.

Bonus: James Scott from ChannelAdvisor's UK office is quoted (pp. 14-17, 29-32).

Go get yourself a read.

by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

TheFind powers commerce in Elle's content community

It's been said that content, community and commerce is the holy grail to Internet success, and that's just what TheFind is now doing.

The partnership effectively creates a destination shopping site on Elle.com, leveraging TheFind's competency in lifestyle goods, piping in products from merchants that match ELLE's audience.

The product results appear under the "Shopping" tab on ELLE's site and can be dropped into stories as products are referenced by writers.

This partnership is similar to the one announced earlier this year by Become.com, which teamed up with the Washington Post to offer local shopping results and a shopping portal on washingtonpost.com.

The terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but I assume that they split referral fees from commissions that take place at the end of the purchase line.

written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor