PayPal and TheFind launch PayPal Shopping - or at least that’s what I’m calling it. The domain for the site isn’t actually paypalshopping.com (some clever entrepreneur owns that one), but actually paypal.thefind.com. The site allows shoppers to see just products from stores that offer PayPal as a payment option.

According to Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind, “there are 175 million products from 500,000 stores on TheFind, while paypal.thefind.com has 50 million products from 200,000 stores.” Paypal has long offered a directory of shops which accept PayPal, but this new site offers a rich shopping experience as opposed to a list of shops ranked by volume.

There is no revenue split among TheFind and PayPal on the site - TheFind takes whatever it makes through it’s sponsored and graphical ads and PayPal monetizes through its normal transaction fees.

Siva explained that the UI for paypal.thifind.com is slightly different - you can see the PayPal logo/icon in a variety of places - but besides the focus on PayPal only merchants, everything else (the algorithm, for example) is the same.

When asked whether there would be promotion of the site by both parties, Siva declined to give details but hinted that there’s definitely a relationship beyond just launching the site.

While PayPal is obviously a leader in the payments space with “revenues last quarter of $439 million” (Business Week June 18), the company is trying to fend off competition from the likes of Google Checkout which is assimilating everything in it’s path. Google Checkout attracted small businesses, then offered incredible promotions to get consumers to sign up, which led more small businesses to integrate as the user base grew and free Adwords credits were doled out, and it has just snowballed from there. I’ve voiced my concerns - especially around customer ownership - but that’s not stopping 94% of merchants from making a quick buck or 10.

Google Checkout is now well integrated into Google Adwords and Google Base/Google Product Search:

Yahoo! and PayPal are testing a similar concept for Yahoo! Search Marketing:

This new PayPal shopping site shows me that PayPal isn’t going to sit by and just watch Google Checkout have all the fun.

As for TheFind, this shows what a scrappy start up can get done and some of the advantages the company has over shopping comparison engines which don’t crawl the web and therefore have a limited set of merchants. Expect TheFind to strike further partnerships like this with any affinity type program - think credit cards, causes (similar to PriceGrabber’s ShopGreen), schools, etc.

Friendly reminder that I’ll be at eBay Live! speaking on buySAFE’s invitation only luncheon panel on multi-channel e-commerce this Friday. Make sure to RSVP if you want to attend.