Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

Shopzilla revenue up 34% YOY

Scripps reported today that Shopzilla's Q1 revenue increased to $63mm from $49mm in the same period last year.  It seems, at least temporarily, that Scripps' efforts to turn around the CSE are paying off.

From the 10-Q: "The growth for the quarter was driven by improvements at Shopzilla that allowed the business to more efficiently increase and monetize user traffic...The increase was primarily attributed to paid session growth derived from an increase in bidding on keywords. Shopzilla's net revenue, when considering search marketing costs incurred, increased 34% for the first quarter of 2008 compared with the first quarter of 2007."

Shopzilla is about to be splintered off of the main company into Scripps Interactive, which will be joined by uSwitch, a CSE for home utilities.

"We continue to focus on making improvements to the consumer experience at Shopzilla and driving traffic to the site, and we plan to continue to operate uSwitch with a pared down cost structure to better manage through the changes in energy switching activity we have experienced in recent periods."

written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

Stylefeeder: one million Facebook installs

Has Stylefeeder just proven that e-commerce can live inside Facebook?

Stylefeeder, a Boston-based social shopping site centered around a recommendation and rating algorithm dubbed the Maximum Margin Matrix Factorization, just passed the million-member mark with its Facebook app.

The gist of the app is this: it connects to your Stylefeeder account and syncs your "shopping finds" between the two properties.  Your picks then display on your profile box while incoming product recommendations stream to you from within the app.

In effect, it replicates the experience you'd find on the main property within Facebook. 

It appears that the application has had a positive effect on Stylefeeder's main property, as well, shooting up past ThisNext and 200,000 monthly uniques in February to ~1 million uniques in April, according to Compete.

Stylefeeder's also ahead of Mark Cuban's RadicalBuy (3,000 installs), Amazon's Giver (1,300 installs) and Grapevine (1,000 installs).

written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor

Yahoo! Shopping launching a bidded marketplace

Yahoo! Product Submit advertisers received the following email today:

Important Notification: Upcoming Changes to Product Submit

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Dear Product Submit advertiser,

We are pleased to announce the upcoming launch of a bidded marketplace. With this change, there will be modifications to your Master Terms & Conditions and Program Terms, which will be detailed in a future email notice that you'll receive in the next 30 days.

We expect the bidded marketplace to have an impact on your day-to-day business. Therefore, we advise you and your team to begin planning for the transition to a bidded model.

As part of this launch, we are expanding the number of product categories and improving reporting within your Product Submit account.

These changes are designed to help you to:

• Better influence the level of traffic you receive from Yahoo! Shopping
• Gain more control over optimizing your product listings
• Gain better visibility into your category performance

Stay tuned!

The Yahoo Product Submit team

Rollout is apparently in July, where feed bidding would be available as well as by category.  Rumor also is that logos will be able to be added by merchants for additional CPC soon. 

written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor