Brian,

Could you explain in more detail what you mean by “there are no comparison listings above the fold” and “(ShopWiki..etc… (all companies focusing on comprehensiveness as apposed to just monetizing every single click)”?

Thanks!

Anyone else experience a problem with the new Shopping.com? Since the redesign it identifies me as being in France and serves the French site (which has the old design and some arcane language I can’t read). How many more does this affect?

paul -
haven’t had those problems yet, but i’m meeting with sdc on friday, so i’ll ask what’s up. or wendy, if you’re reading this, feel free to respond.
-b

Interesting observation… I’ve got a 21″ monitor running at 1680×1050 and even at this size which is not considered normal I’m seeing 2 products above the fold; that’s not many.

Maustin, above the fold is considered to be the content that appears w/o scrolling down. The phrase comes from the newspaper world where above the fold is considered to be the stuff on the front page that appears before a reader bends the paper vertically open.

Brian, got you message… I’ll chat with you tomorrow ok?

vic - thanks for filling in for me on the ‘above the fold’ question. look forward to talking to you today (i’m on the east coast, btw).

maustin75 - wanted to follow up on vic’s response. on my screen (which i still think is the typical computer screen, but i have no data to back that up), all i see on shopping.com (sdc) when i click on a product listing is the shopping.com header, a banner, and a sponsor button. no products. which tells me that sdc is able to monetize ‘traditional’ cpm advertising better than the cpc based advertising the company had been pitching as its business model. yes, i’m making an assumption, but that’s what i do.

taking into account that sdc was making 44% of it’s revenue from google adsense ads (as of a year and a half ago) AND cpm based advertising is doing so well (not just for shopping.com, but for the industry in general), why does sdc even need the merchant cpc advertising that takes a lot of time and resources to maintain and grow (staff of account managers, staff of sales people, staff of taggers/normalizers in another country, lots of conferences, etc). wouldn’t it be smarter for shopping.com to develop a more comprehensive database of listings, improve the user experience finally thinking about loyalty (de-emphasize getting people to click in and then click out immediately) and position itself as the alternative to google for shopping.

ok, this can’t happen overnight for shopping.com because the company is so dependent on paid traffic from google adwords and yahoo search marketing. also, if it suddenly cut the price floors for all its listings, it couldn’t afford to pay its affiliates the ridiculously high revenue share (some negotiations start at 90%).

that’s why there’s an opportunity for a shopwiki, thefind, windows product search live, pronto. the crawlers are focused on user experience. focused on comprehensiveness. focuses on relevancy.

it’s not like the traditional shopping comparison engines don’t get this…smarter.com is now crawling and seems to be dedicating serious resources to getting it right. shopzilla says on its homepage that the company has products from 80,000 stores and those 80000 are not all providing feeds. and then there’s google base…only a very small portion of it’s stores are from a crawl, but because the listings on base are free, the database is more comprehensive (base supposedly has over 30K stores vs. the aprx. 10K stores sdc has).

ok, enough for now.

[...] d 5 sponsored results at the bottom of the page (before the ‘next’ button)? I chided Shopping.com for pushing their shopping comparison engine listings belo [...]

[...] d 5 sponsored results at the bottom of the page (before the ‘next’ button)? I chided Shopping.com for pushing their shopping comparison engine listings belo [...]