Google Product Search is a price comparison engine - Again!

Froogle - Google Product Search, which launched as Froogle many years ago as a price comparison shopping engine later changed it’s format to a simple product search engine that would display the stores that sell a product you are searching for, without grouping the stores that sell the searched product according to prices, but simply in random algorithmic order - each product listing displaying a merchant-specific description and other details.

This was probably because froogle would, at the time, crawl e-stores for price and product information and the index was anything but accurate. Since introducing google base, the product search engine has stopped crawling the web for product info, it instead relies on data-feeds submitted by merchants - in a manner much similar to Shopping.com, Shopzilla and other price comparison sites. Despite the added accuracy, few people actually use google’s product search feature independently of the top-three product listings that appear within universal search.

Now, again, google seems to be experimenting with the price comparison engine format, complete with one description, and product specs per product - which is great news shoppers - there is now a real price comparison engine that includes more buying options than any other out there. As for merchants, most of whom already have their datafeeds uploaded to google base, This would be one of the few price comparison sites that is completely free - merchants don’t pay for clicks or sales, and if your store offers competitive prices, all the better, expect additional traffic!

Not all searches are showing up as price comparison results, but more SERPs are changing their skin real quick. Probably not very long before the transition is completed.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Venturebeat article about the growth of visual shopping search service Like.com

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Amazon Product Ads - Amazon becomming a comparison shopping engine!?!

Big news happened yesterday, and I almost missed it. I came across an article that I sort of bookmarked in my del.icio.us to read later, and forgot all about until I came across the same news in techcrunch again today when I had one of those “WTF?” moments.

Anyway, Amazon, it seems, has launched Product Ads - it will transform the retailer into a comparison shopping engine. Why there is no press release or an email about this, is something I have no Idea about, but apparently amazon is going to put product listings - from other retailers - on amazon.com and for a per click fee, direct traffic straight to these retailers’ websites, instead of buyers having to buy using amazon. This will eventually make amazon something very similar to shopping.com, price grabber, nextag, shopwiki, etc.

More on the story at: Tech Crunch, Comparison Engines, Redeye VC

“With Product Ads, as a seller you can participate in this cost-per-click program that allows customers to see YOUR products and price offerings. Customers viewing your products can click over to your website where they can buy directly from you.”

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A Web 2.0 way to track shipments for online shoppers

You love shopping online, in fact, you buy online all the time. That’s cool, but because online shopping also means having to keep a track of the shipments of your orders, it can be quite a headache at times.

G2web20.net, a web 2.0 apps directory, had a link to Trackmyshipments.com in their RSS feed today. TrackMyShipments is a free, online shipment notification aggregation service, by which I mean, it can provide to online shoppers, the ability to track their shipments in one place - instead of the websites of various shipping services - and - without the need to dig out tracking codes each time one wishes to track a shipment’s status.

The way this works is pretty simple. Shoppers need to forward their “Item shipped” notification emails from e-stores to the service, which then automatically uses the tracking codes in those emails to track shipments and update customers each time the status changes via email and/or SMS.

The TrackMyShipments’ algorithm extracts the shipper (eg Fedex) and tracking number automatically from the email without you having to do anything else.

After that you start to get email updates about where the package is, its status, its estimated arrival date etc. You never have to worry again about the status of your shipment.

I think this is a fantastic idea that online shoppers will love. I’m not sure how they plan to monetize their service. It’s free to use at the time, maybe a nominal fee for people with a lot of shipments to track or ads with SMSes and emails would be worth the kind of a service on offer.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

First(?) Widget ad spotted on CJ

No, Commission Junction hasn’t joined the cool affiliate networks and launched a widget advertising platform.

GAP, who have an affiliate program there, today announced something they call an AdPod - It’s a javascript that can be embedded to your website, and the widget will use meta-tags and keywords to dynamically display products and ads from gap that complement your web-page’s content; much like how adsense works with text-ads from google.

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

No more Free overnight shipping at Zappos!

According to an email sent out to it’s affiliates by the giant online shoe store - Zappos, they are no longer going to offer free overnight shipping on the web-store.

We will no longer be promoting “Free Overnight Shipping” and we no longer will be promoting our price protection policy. Instead, we will be focusing more on our “free shipping” and our expanding selection of merchandise.

Earlier last year, Zappos started offering this facility to customers only a few days after Amazon announced their entry into the shoe retail business with Endless.com, a store owned by amazon that sells shoes and handbags, and ships overnight for free.

Clearly, Zappos seems to have come to realize that offering overnight shipping for free just because a new entrant in the market, albeit run by an e-retail pioneer, is offering such a scheme to get a share of the shoes and handbags pie, is just not profitable enough, even after doing Over $800 mm in sales in 2007.

Amazon, with is vast and diversified nature of business can afford to sell on very small margins. That, however, should not mean death for other e-retailers. IMO the future of e-retail is not in giant malls, but niche stores that know their product and can offer a quality of customer service that is at par with or better than big e-retail entities. By that, I don’t mean Amazon is the big brother or something, they are in fact doing a great job as a huge mall, and as endless - they run a fantastic niche store.

What I didn’t like is that Zappos quickly got afraid of amazon entering the market and started offering free overnight shipping, only to abandon the scheme later. If a niche store can’t afford the margins of their competition, they should work on bettering their product and service rather than copying their competition’s marketing tactics that they can’t handle.

Blogged with Flock

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

e-retail has a lot of room for improvement, usability and customer serivce wise

Was checking my RSS feeds after almost a week today, and stumbled upon this eye-opener.

The Get Elastic blog posts about a study that was done on 300 major e-retailers on the basis various usability and customer support related factors. The results make you wonder that e-commerce could really have been much larger/more trusted/liked than it is already only if e-retailers would pay more attention to giving customers a ‘better than simply “good”‘ shopping experience.

A few of the study’s findings:

Enlarge Image Feature - used by 76% of sites

Estimated Delivery - 74% of sites

Gift Cards - used by 58%

Timely and Accurate E-Mail Support - 58% responded correctly within 24 hours

Free Shipping - 43%

Pre-Checkout Shipping Calculation - found on 42% of sites

In Stock Availability - used by 39% (Especially important over the holidays)

Poor Fonts - 38% had fonts that are difficult to read - either too small or not web-friendly

Multiple Image Views - 38% offered this feature

More Than 4 Steps in Checkout - 35% of sites

Customer Reviews - 33% of sites

In-Store Pick Up - 10% of sites that have local stores

Mulitple Payment Options - 10-20% offer one or more options like PayPal, Google Checkout, pay by check or Bill Me Later

More on the Get Elastic Blog

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Google puts product searches above ads this season

Just noticed this while searching for some products on google.

The universal search now shows results from google products (what used to be froogle) just above adwords ads.

Somehow, this way of displaying product search results makes them a lot more viewable than earlier when they were shown just above standard organic search results, This new format does take a lot of eyeballs away from paid advertisements. this is bad news for PPC affiliates and advertisers who use adwords to promote their products but haven’t uploaded their datafeeds to google base yet.

Blogged with Flock

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Yet another social shopping network acquired

Sugar, Inc, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, the online publishing company that publishes popular blogs targeted towards women has acquired a social shopping startup ShopStyle, reports Om Malik.

Today, the company decided to take the next step in its evolution and has bought Los Altos, Calif.-based ShopStyle, a social shopping site for an undisclosed amount of money. “We had content and community, and now we are adding commerce,” said Brian Sugar, CEO of Sugar Publishing. The company is also changing its name to Sugar Inc., in order to better reflect its broader focus.

The acquisition is seen as a move to make use of ShopStyle’s existing infrastructure and business model that is aimed at revenue generation to monetize the sugar network of blogs that currently lot as many as 5 million unique visitors a month.

More on GigaOM ->

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Amazon has potential to become the next iTunes

Mashable reports that Amazon might be launching it’s DRM free music download service on or around September 17th. Armed with the music catalogs of music giants Universal and EMI and selling most tracks for 99 cents or less, there are some reasons worth considering on why Amazon could become the next leader in the music download space.

• Amazon already sells a lot of music and media on CDs, and has all the necessary infrastructure and customers for this new service.
• Amazon loves APIs and webservices, it won’t be long before developers and amazon affiliates will be able to create interesting apps using ECS (Amazon’s webservice for that allows developers to access their product-related data), who knows, someone might even create an iTunes plugin that integrates amazon to your iTunes/iPod.
• This is entirely DRM free music, which means it’s not windows-only unlike many many other iTunes competitors out there, amazon will be delivering a truly cross-platform music download service.

What do you think? Does Amazon have what it takes to become the next iTunes?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!