Someone should start an adult shopping comparison engine. Seriously. Almost all the comparison engines list adult products (under ‘Personal Care, Mature, Massagers, etc.), we all know the adult industry is huge, and Amazon even quietly started to push adult toys. I’m sure someone will do it.

Ok, that was just to wake you up. Now, the next generation shopping comparison engine? I think someone could start up a successful comparison engine based on a pay per sale (ala Bill Gross’ Snap) model. What got me thinking of this? A couple things…

First, Snap’s announcement that it was working with Smarter.com for comparison shopping. While some people erroneously thought this implied Smarter.com would work on a pay per sale basis, the idea definitely has merit. Snap offers it’s advertisers two pay per sale options:

-Fixed-Cost-Per-Action (FCPA)
You choose a fixed amount and pay only when a consumer completes the specific action(s) you want: purchases a product, registers for a service, etc.
-Variable-Cost-Per-Action (VCPA)
You choose a fixed percentage of purchase price and pay only when the item is sold to a customer from Snap.

Isn’t this the way merchants want to sell? They know what margin they are comfortable with and they pay a % of sales accordingly. Yes, with PPC you can always back into this number, but Snap takes away any guesswork.

Second, eBay’s acquisition of Shopping.com opens up the potential for different payment options for merchants. Right now Shopping.com works on the PPC model, but that’s not the case over at eBay. eBay sellers pay a listing fee + a % of sales based on the final value of the auction. Is eBay going to force its merchants to learn a completely new marketing method and participate in a PPC auction? Don’t think so. eBay could (and probably will) set up a tabbed browsing system on Shopping.com where eBay listings are completely separate from Shopping.com listings. This would be conducive to two different marketing methods, but why not shake things up a bit and take a step forward as opposed to continuing to do what everyone else is doing?

Third, there’s been a little more coverage of the pay per sale method in the media. An article in this week’s Economist talks about it. While there’s nothing new here, I really haven’t seen that many stories about this model as I think everyone is busy managing their PPC accounts on YSM and AdWords. Then there is John Battelle’s book The Search giving Bill Gross (and Goto.com/Overture and Snap) some face time. Just have a feeling more people are thinking about pay per sale.

Pay per sale. Something to think about this Monday morning…you might notice that I’m getting a little more chatty as opposed to just posting lots of interviews. Don’t worry, I’ll continue the interviews, but I realized that most of the breakout blogs have a ‘talking head’ aspect…just testing it out.