WSJ Article - “Shopzilla’s revenue more than doubled over year ago-levels, to $35.2 million, and its segment profit jumped to $7.3 million from $1.2 million a year earlier.”

MarketWatch - “Revenue [for Scripps] rose 19% to $595 million, bolstered by continued growth Scripps’ cable networks and Shopzilla, the online comparison shopping service it acquired in June. Excluding Shopzilla, revenue rose 15%.”

AP - “Shopzilla’s revenue more than doubled year-over-year and profit increased about six-fold, Scripps’ CEO Kenneth Lowe said. The number of unique visitors to Shopzilla also was up sharply during the quarter. The deal to purchase Shopzilla in June initially raised concern among some investors worried over intense competition in online comparison shopping. But Lowe said at the time that the 126-year-old company has prospered by embracing each new era in media technology.”

Official EW Scripps Release - “At Shopzilla, we’re seeing plenty of evidence that a rapidly growing number of online shoppers are discovering the utility of this very powerful, online product search and price comparison service.”

Many of the shopping comparison engines allow merchants to specify ‘Promo text’ within the data feed. Shopzilla, for instance, allows a merchant to add pre-set promotional designations such as ‘Same Day Shipping’, ‘Price Before Rebate’, or ‘Gift with Purchase’. While adding this kind of promotional text is a step in the right direction, what about coupons? Aren’t all online shoppers now trained to look for coupons?

Users of Smarter.com and Yahoo! Shopping no longer have to leave these comparison engines to search for the latest coupon deals.

Smarter.com claims to be “among the first comparison shopping engines that allows [merchants] to integrate coupons at the product level. We’ve found that by including coupon info with your product listings, consumers see more of the ‘big picture’ before determining who to buy from (meaning more qualified leads to you).”

This is a no brainer for the comparison engines, and I’m really surprised that it’s taken so long for this type of coupon integration. See an example here and here. It’s nice to see the little guy innovating.

Yahoo! Shopping, with the data feed of of all data feeds (they accept sooo much information) has long allowed merchants to include promotional text. However, the site is now highlighting ‘Deals’ on product pages - see picture above. Users can click on a green link at the top of the page to see all offers associated with a product.

I’ll be offline the rest of today and all of tomorrow. Be back Friday. In the meantime, catch up on some recent posts:

Interview with Andrew Holt of Dontbuyjunk
Halloween Showdown - In a preview of the holiday shopping season, see how the shopping comparison engines stack up.

After a couple years at Columbia, I started to become a little curt with people. When I graduated, I left NYC for 6 years and returned my patient self. After just over a year and a half back in NYC, I’m turning back into that not so patient person…so, I think it’s time for a little break.

First week of November, I’m heading to Silicon Valley for about a month with a side trip to LA for a week. I can always stay with family, but if anyone knows of a great sublet in Silicon Valley/SF (yes, I know I can find one on Craigslist), please let me know.

During my trip, I would definitely like to sit down face to face with NexTag, FatLens, Yahoo!, Become, Shopping.com, Dontbuyjunk, Froogle, SideStep, Mobissimo, Smarter, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla…hmmm…a couple more comparison engines out there than out here, huh?

-brian

I met with Andrew Holt, co-founder Dontbuyjunk, after Search Engine Strategies (SES) in August. Finally caught up with him again for an interview. Andrew was a computer science major at Stanford. He left Yahoo! Shopping last August after almost 2 years at the company. He is currently working on Dontbuyjunk with his partner, Rishi Khaitan.

History…
“Rishi and I are product enthusiasts. Friends would come to us all the time and ask us what product to buy. We wanted to provide a clear, concise, and accurate technology solution to answer that question.”

“We spent significant time developing our technology, TotalRank. We modeled it after a knowledgeable friend. The goal is to form accurate recommendations personalized through technology. There are three parts of TotalRank:

“Ratings. We’ve tried to make this very comprehensive with user reviews and over 200 sources of web reviews. Products are rated on a list of attributes.”

“The confidence level we have in a rating. In terms of confidence, we look at review quantity, age, consistency, and source quality - all things that people would weigh when determining the relevance of reviews. TotalRank lists products ranked by how they would be recommended. The products at top are there because we’re confident they have a good rating.”

“Personalization. We dynamically re-rank the product list based on attributes that the user finds important. If you’re looking for portable mp3 player, you go to friend and he personalizes rankings for exactly what you need. We’ve found that it’s very accurate.”

“We’ve received a lot of feedback from enthusiasts saying that the TotalRank results match what they would recommend. In the end, the goal is to answer the question of what to buy. We don’t sort by price or popularity, as these things that aren’t as relevant if you’re trying to figure out best product for you. If you select everything you feel is important, you could buy the first product [listed] and that would be the best product for you.”
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Blogs are finally getting some respect…

At the Google Dance this year (during SES), I asked a product manager for Google News why my blog was continually rejected as a source. I was told that while some blogs are legitimate, there are too many which should not be listed along side major media sources.

While Google is sticking by this script, I’m very pleased to see Yahoo! incorporating blogs into Yahoo! News Search:

“Today we’ve begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.” - from the Yahoo! Search Blog

The other big news of the week was AOL’s purchace of Jason Calacanis’s Weblogs Inc.

Douglas Sherrets of Minority Rapport, a blog about social networking/user generated content - think FaceBook, MySpace, MyYearBook, Jambo, etc. - e-mailed me the following question: How much value do you think is added to the user experience of shopping engines when you are logged in versus not logged in?

Here’s what I had to say:

Depending on the shopping engine, there is a value to registering/logging in. Almost all engines have basic features for registered/logged in users such as the ability to save shopping lists, get special updates/announcements, and leave reviews. In addition to these basic features, some of the engines have ‘advanced’ features:

Froogle - There is a feature called ‘Wish List‘ wish enables you to share your shopping list with friends and family - esentially a very basic gift registry. If you’ve registered, logged in, and created a wish list, anyone who searches for your email adress on Froogle can see your list.

PriceGrabber - There are two features here which I find interesting. First, ‘Price Alerts’ allows you to set a target price and be notified when a product is available below your target price. Not as elegant a solution as an RSS feed, but good enough. Second, ‘BottomLine Price’ allows you to see if it’s better to buy a set of products from a single merchant or multiple merchants.

Yahoo! Shopping - Similar to PriceGrabber, Y! has a lowest total price feature. Like all engines Y! offers the ability to save products/create a wish list, but Y! gives enables users to add notes about saved products and easily email the products to a friend.

As you can see, nothing groundbreaking, but definitely some useful features.

eBay recently launched Reviews and Guides and as usual, the eBay community jumped at the opportunity to contribute. I hate to see companies re-create the wheel, so I hope that eBay integrates Epinions into its Reviews, but with the amount of traffic that eBay gets and it’s extremely active community, I have a feeling that this might not be that necessary.

Looking for recommendations on a new notebook. Need an ultraportable (light) machine with long battery life and great cutstomer service. I currently have an IBM Thinkpad T30, but after 2.5yrs, it’s starting to die. Willing to spend aprx. $2000.

According to Dontbuyjunk, I should be considering the following:
Toshiba Portege R200
Sony VAIO VGN-T350p/l
IBM Thinkpad X41
Dell Latitude X1
Fujitsu Lifebook P7010D

Anyone have experience with Toshiba or Sony?

Thanks
-b

A week ago I wrote about the start up fees of some of the shopping comparison engines. In that post, I stated that Shopping.com’s (SDC) minimum initial deposit (which goes towards clicks - there is no setup fee) is $100. This is incorrect. The actual initial deposit is only $25 (down from $500). I was charged $100 because I ran across a small bug that SDC is working to fix (and could have already fixed by the time of this post). If you signed up with SDC within the last couple weeks and were charged $100, you should send an email to customer service.

Discovering this minor bug gave me the opportunity to talk briefly with Trent Scoffield, Director US Sales & Operations…
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Found on Start.com News via The Laurence Timms State Machine, there’s a new shopping gadget for Start.com powered by MSN Shopping. It’s a sleek little application.

Here’s a bit more about the gadget from Laurence: “The MSN Shopping gadget accepts search terms and then returns a short list of matching products. You can view product info within the gadget or opt to pop open a new window to see the details within the MSN Shopping site. The gadget also remembers the three most recent searches, and has a ‘featured items’ style line along the bottom. This looks like another elegantly simple consumption of an RSS feed. ”

As I have a feeling that most of you don’t know about Start.com, it’s MSN’s answer to MyYahoo and Google’s Personalized homepage. While MyYahoo is still my homepage of choice, since Start.com opened up to external developers, I find myself more and more drawn to the site.

In a couple weeks, the ghouls and goblins will be out in full force. Actually, we’ll probably see more superheroes than forces of evil, but you get the picture. Halloween is here. And according to Shopping.com’s Consumer Demand Index (CDI), searches for ‘costumes’ showed an increase of 140% last week (Sept. 19 - Oct. 2) compared to the previous week. As a kid, my mother dressed me up as a smurf one year and a stick of gum the next…not an auspicious start. In an attempt to pick out a more appropriate halloween costume in addition to some halloween decorations and candy, I figure it’s time to check out how the shopping comparison engines are handling Halloween.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I have an alternative motive…the Holiday Season is almost here. I think the Halloween sections of the comparison shopping enignes might give us a bit of insight into what we might expect to see around the corner…
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In case you missed it, here’s some general comparison engine news from this week:

PriceGrabber launched a comparison shopping section for Cell Phones, Plans, and Accessories in conjunction with InPhonic (a great company out of DC…ok, I’m biased, I worked withInPhonic’s CIO at VarsityBooks.com years ago.)

eyefortravel conducted an interview with Keith Melnick, VP BizDev Kayak.com. This guy seems damn cocky…nice to see some attitude.

Become.com moves into Japan through a partnership with Transcosmos. If you read this blog, you knew this announcement was coming. I think Become.com is onto something big, but the company needs a lot of help with messaging. I’ve started to refer to Become as the Consumer Reports of the 21st Century…while I’m not sure this will stick, it starts to explain Become’s model.

SideStep signs deal with Hilton Hotels Corp. Travel providers love the travel comparison engine (travel search) model as they get to own the customer. While there will always be a place for online travel agents (OTAs) like Travelocity or Expedia, I love the model that SideStep, Kayak, and Mobissimo have adopted.

You can always check our recent industry news here

At Shop.org, I sat down with Iggy Fanlo, Shopping.com’s President of Worldwide Field Operations. Thanks to Lindsay @ AccessPR for setting up the meeting. Here’s what Iggy had to say…

On eBay & Shopping.com (SDC)…
“eBay’s beginnings were about bringing together community and efficiencies where there weren’t efficiencies - buyers couldn’t find sellers and vice versa. The marketplace flourished, but eBay realized that with PPC services from MSN, Google, and Yahoo!, that the world was not necessarily a closed space. eBay dominates ecommerce – they have a very strong hold on used goods, collectibles, and refurbished products. Anytime there’s scarcity, they do well. However, they weren’t dominating the new and seasoned market. Shopping.com adds a piece of ecommerce that wasn’t their sweet spot. [With Shopping.com], they can make a quick, bold entry and take it to a new level.”

As a merchant [Home Security & Microscopes] on Shopping.com, one thing that concerns me is that I might suddenly find 4 additional merchants selling my products at ridiculously low prices on Shopping.com with big ‘Buy it Now’ graphic next to the listings…
“At the end of the day, the consumer has to be treated as the North Star. The only way to serve the merchants is to thrill the customers. How we implement is to be determined. Consumers want to see it all. They want it in an orderly digestible fashion. They want everything in one place, but they want it differentiated. Give users choice, the most choice. Buy it new for $100 or buy it used in condition Z for $60. On the site, this may take the form of different tabs. We won’t do anything that confuses the user. We’ll try to give people choice. There’s a way of doing it intelligible so you serve merchants and sellers and consumers.”
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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:
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