ComparisonEngines

If you want a full report on Vertical Leap, here’s a list of bloggers covering the event.

This is my quick take:

Vertical Search is pretty darn hot right now and there are a ton of companies jumping into the game. Keynote speaker David Hills, CEO of Looksmart, compared vertical search to the emergence of cable television. Long ago, no one believed there would be a golf channel, soap channel, cooking channel, etc., but those channels and are now thriving. David highlighted BET. While BET’s reach is minimal compared with that of a major network, the channel offers unique programming for a targeted audience. In the end, advertisers are willing to pay a premium to reach BET’s veiwers. The consumers, programmers, and advertisers all benefit.

The same is true of vertical search. Google and Yahoo are great for general research, but vertical search engines know what the users want and can provide ‘correct’ or unique results. Advertisers will pay a premium for this type of targeted traffic.

Unfortunately, though, many shopping comparison engines have thrived simply because they are playing a ‘traffic arbitrage game’ (I might have stolen that phrase from Siva Kumar of FatLens), buying PPC ads on the general search engines and selling PPC ads to merchants for 2-5x that amount. While there is nothing wrong with this model – in fact it’s an extremely lucrative one – I’m just worried that we’re going to see more and more companies jumping on the shopping comparison bandwagon (and vertical search bandwagon in general) which have no place in this world.

As shopping season quickly approaches, expect to see many launches (yesterday OnePAL popped up). I’ll be interested in asking these companies how they plan to differentiate themselves from the established players. Did they develop a new technology? Do they offer features not found on the current engines? Or are they just around to make a quick buck through a smart arbitrage game?

At this point, I have to applaud PriceGrabber which has developed strong traffic through partnerships with over 300 companies and Mobissimo which has built an extremely comprehensive travel search engine and has not spent much (if any) money on PPC marketing. Expect Mobissimo to follow PriceGrabber’s example and develop distribution partnerships as opposed to paying PPC fees.

Ok, I just got back to NYC on a red eye. It’s time to sleep.

From Vertical Leap – Beatrice Tarka just announced that Mobissimo signed a deal with American Airlines (AA). Starting in July, AA listings will show up in Mobissimo’s results. In the past, AA has been reluctant to work with travel search engines and even sued FareChase back in 2002.

High quality article (registration required) on eBay from Leslie Walker, Washington Post Staff Writer. It’s another piece on eBay’s growing pains explaining that merchants are looking for alternative ways to sell online. The article mentions ProStores, but does not mention the Shopping.com acquisition.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Gary Neubert, a Tampa resident who has sold shipping supplies on eBay since 1999, said he has been steadily building traffic to his own Web site to bypass eBay’s commissions whenever possible. Half his sales today come through his own site, he said. Neubert said he and others are increasingly exploring options outside eBay.

“EBay has been a wonderful place to start and incubate a business,” Neubert said. “Where it has been weak is helping you once you are growing and thriving. The whole Internet commerce evolution has been a fantastic opportunity that only comes along once in a generation, but now we are ready to take it to the next level.”

I’m sure you’ve read about the conference by now, but here are some quick thoughts in respect to eBay, ecommerce, and comparison engines.

ProStores is part of eBay’s effort to assist sellers increase sales and reach new customers beyond eBay (WSJ article). ProStores is similar to Yahoo! Store, cityMax, Homestead, and many other website hosting and building solutions. The big difference is the integration with eBay (ProStore users can easily post their products on eBay) and the fact that ProStores is an official eBay service which gives it free access to the eBay community. ProStores also allows for automated feed submission to 4 shopping comparison engines: Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Froogle.

I informally talked to around 40 eBay sellers – small and large (including a couple Power Sellers). What amazed me was the fact that people in the eBay community know relatively little about marketing beyond eBay. I’d say that about 70% of the people I spoke to didn’t have a stand alone website and knew nothing about shopping comparison engines (or PPC marketing, SEO, Affiliate Programs, etc.). We’ll have to wait and see how eBay integrates Shopping.com into the eBay world, but there is clearly a a huge opportunity here for the eBay community to extend it’s ecommerce reach.

While sellers who have new products can easily mesh with the Shopping.com listings, I think there is an even larger opportunity for eBay sellers of used products to gain sales through Shopping.com. This could be similar to the used product listing integration on Amazon (see example). Yahoo Shopping already has this type of offering, but I don’t feel that the intergration properly promotes the sellers of used or refurbished products (or auctions for that matter). In this search for a Sony Vaio Laptop, you can see a link for ‘Used & Refurbished’ under the product image. Hopefully you’re still with me and starting to see the possibilities. eBay is already an ecommerce behemoth, but pushing into shopping comparison engines, storefronts, etc. opens up a whole new world.

OK, enough gushing.