There are a number of companies which provide services to retailers listing products on the shopping comparison engines. Channel Intelligence does this and a lot more. Here’s a write up of my call with Rob Wight of Channel Intelligence…

Briefly, what is Channel Intelligence?
“We provide commerce data services to manufacturers, dealers, and affiliates to make it easy for them to get a user from looking at a product to buying a product. We are a data based company that provides information to make the process of ecommerce easy and successful for dealers, manufacturers, and affiliates.”

You provide a lot of different services to clients, but how do you work with manufacturers, dealers, and affiliates on the shopping comparison engine front?
“We have varying relationships with all our partners. We have paying clients in all three categories, but not all relationships are paying.”

We work with hundreds of Manufacturers (defined as the original creator of product)…
“We help manufacturers list the dealers (online and brick and mortar) that have their product in stock and are able to sell it right now. We link manufacturer product pages to the product pages of the online resellers based on who the manufacturer chooses. For brick and mortar dealers, we list dealers that have product in stock right now so the consumer can go directly to the stores to buy it. We receive a daily feed of inventory information (both for online products and local inventory for the dealers).”

We work with thousands of Dealers (defined as reseller of a product)…
“We provide dealers with services to syndicate their commerce content out to shopping engines and other affiliates so their products are effectively listed on affiliate sites. This involves either getting the products into unified listings or in the non-unified product pages.”

We work with dozens and dozens of Affiliates (defined as intermediaries - any one of a variety of different sites that aren’t dealers or manufacturers)…
“Affiliates can be shopping engines, but also other types of aggregators such as large portals, specialty content sites, Amazon, eBay, search engines, etc. We customize the outbound syndication feed for effectiveness within the particular affiliate. What we send to a search engine is different than what we send to a unified page on a shopping comparison engine.”

“We also provide affiliates with back end data services to help them unify products, help them categorize and have as effective a commerce site as possible. With some affiliates, we provide them with feeds detailing local availability of products, with others, we provide categorization of products.”

“We’re a massive data aggregator. Circuit City will tell us to syndicate out their data. HP will tell us to create links out to dealers. An affiliate will ask us to provide local shopping information.”
Can you talk more about your clients and partners?
“We currently have around 200-250 clients in the three groups which are paying us. In many cases, our services are not publicly acknowledged. We’re a back end data provider. Just like BASF, whose tagline is ‘We don’t make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better.’ [Channel Intelligence] doesn’t make the shopping sites, we make the shopping sites better.”

“We’re a practical company. We have a number of relationships in all areas of the business - with many retailers and manufacturers because of the nature of the product, it’s hard to hide [our relationship]. Many of the services we provide to the affiliates are branded. For example, if you go to CNET and see local shopping information, we’re the provider.”

“We’re very good and guarded about information we have. We have inventory information coming in from multiple dealers. We have to be very respectful of this information. We have manufacturer sell through data which is deeply confidential. We’re very careful about it and have spent years to guarantee that we’re vault like.”

What shopping comparison engine related services do you offer to online retailers?
“For dealers [retailers], we’ve announced Commerce Data Syndication (CDS) services. What we do is help the dealers by bringing their data in and helping transform it so it’s decorated properly for the affiliates – for example, there’s keyword decoration, description decoration. We don’t alter data, but we augment the data. We understanding how to describe a particular attribute – ‘affiliate A’ needs this column to appear a certain way while ‘affiliate C’ needs different things at the end [of the field]. There’s a big difference between altering data versus augmenting. With unified items, we come to know what particular affiliates call a certain product, and if a dealer calls it something else, we’ll make sure to change it so that it matches up with the affiliate.”

“We are a unification engine, so we know what everyone calls a particular item. We’re able to transpose what one dealer calls something to make sure a dealer will appear on the product page [of an affiliate] correctly. That’s a lot of the technology we have. Quietly, behind the scenes, is a master unified item which has all the dealers [associated with that item]. We have a master view and know where items aught to be placed. We can tell an affiliate about an item, and we can help a dealer translate from what they call it to what the affiliate calls it.”

“And we have a lot of deep partnerships with the shopping engines. We’re not interested in and we’re not going to be a competitor of the shopping engines. We want them to become more successful with more [of our] clients.”

What about optimization?
“There clearly is optimization – what we call decorating of items – which involves an understanding of the practice and business of shopping engines. [Channel Intelligence] knows how the shopping comparison engines like to get data and when they like to get data. We know the order, style, and approach they use. We know what to avoid. We provide a detailed set of reporting to everyone (so they can understand effectiveness of products) and we help them track and provide reporting on how the products are doing.”

“The person who benefits is the client. The more we can simplify the buying decision process, the more we can reduce costs for each of our clients, and the more they can spend time on quality, content, and customer support. We’re able to facilitate commerce for each one of them. We create a win, win, win, scenario for all our clients.”

“If Circuit City can sell an HP laptop through NexTag, we’ve helped all our clients succeed.”

Are you hiring? [Editor’s Note: Yes, the light bulb finally went on – sometimes take me a while - and I started to understand the power of Channel Intelligence.]
“Yes, we’re hiring.”

What are the fees for working with Channel Intelligence?
“We generally charge on a subscription model based on the amount of work we do on the client’s behalf. For a reseller, it might be based on how many items they have and how many destinations we’re sending the data to. We work on a fixed basis or flexible basis based on the services involved.”

How many merchant data feeds do you manage?
“300-500 Resellers worldwide are sending data to Channel Intelligence.”

What do retailers need to know about the shopping comparison engines? Why can’t they manage this marketing channel themselves?
“First off, they can manage it themselves. It depends on the number of products and number of sites they want to send feeds to.”

“We’re helping someone become more and more effective at managing this very important channel. We have an advantage because we’re the largest person getting in and sending information. We’re able to understand and work with, manage change, and make these feeds effective. Feed management isn’t just the notion of sending data. The hard part isn’t delivering the feed, it’s making the feed effective.”

What about tracking?
“It’s a key part of what we provide – the ability to understand effectiveness and control the business spend. We have provided tracking services for years. We provide each of our clients with the ability to do end to end tracking of every product. We’re also able to track what other sales came along because of that first click. That’s one of the advantages of the shopping comparison engines; the ability to drive other sales.”

Anything else that you’d like to add about the shopping comparison engine industry in general?

1. “As a channel, we see the comparison shopping engines as a very effective and growing area. There’s a belief that it’s about pricing, but it’s about knowledge and selection – especially the notion behind unified products and inventory availability (particularly in the local area).”

“Shopping comparison engines went form having a small set of dealers to having a lot of larger clients – Circuit City, Best Buy, eToys are starting to use these engines. While we can’t comment on individual success, in aggregate, it’s a very successful, profitable channel.”

2. “There’s been an explosion in number of choices, and we expect to see many new shopping comparison engines come into the market as people realize the potency and value. We think they will add new and exciting capabilities.”

3. “We think there are really excellent companies out there, especially some of the larger ones that are increasing value, service and knowledge.”