HealthPricer is a vertical shopping comparison engine focused on Health and Wellness. HealthPricer is owned by OnePersonHealth, a public company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. While I think the company faces an uphill battle, the business proposition makes sense. There are some sets of products – in this case, health related goods and services – for which consumers might need more than just merchant reviews and prices during the buying process. When dealing with my health, I want to know as much information as possible. As a Jupiter study pointed out, 45% of online consumers access the internet for health related information. Add all those information seeking eyeballs to a growing e-commerce market, and you can start to see HealthPricer’s opportunity. The current stable of shopping comparison engines do offer Health and Wellness products, but they lack the nutritional and scientific content that a vitamin shopper might want. Just as Google and Yahoo! can’t be everything to everybody and therefore open up the door for vertical search engines, maybe Yahoo! Shopping and Shopzilla can’t be everything to everybody and open up the door up for a second set of vertical search engines.
I spoke with Mike Brown, President, and Gerd Zobel, VP E-Commerce of OnePersonHealth a couple weeks ago…
What is OnePersonHealth?
Mike: “OnePersonHealth (OPH), initially founded in 2001, recognized an opportunity to be a part of the baby boomer demand for health and wellness by helping them understand nutritional needs. Early on the company built an online assessment engine which allows people to go online and go through a fairly long (20mins) assessment on personal health, medications, lifestyle, etc. At the end of the assessment, the user gets several different reports. Included is a recommendation engine which tells the user certain supplements to take to lead a healthy lifestyle. We’re a science based company and have aggregated and built a lot of data in that area.”
“The business opportunity in the long term is to be a health information service to consumers on the internet. We will be a specific shopping comparison engine starting with supplements, sports nutrition, and pharmaceuticals. Our leg up on general comparison shopping engines is that we’ll provide a much broader base of information; we’ll get into things like ingredients a user might need. This is where the assessment engine ties into HealthPricer.”
“We provide detailed information to consumers on the internet to allow them to make very quick, correct decisions about acquiring the right products for them based on scientific information.”
Gerd: “We want to provide an experience that allows you to educate yourself and then make the right purchasing decision. The core differentiator from other comparison engines is that we want to go beyond price. We want to provide the content.”
Mike: “The company went public in 2004 (symbol OPH). We have 16 people on staff. We have a strong Board of Directors. Dave Turner, the Chairman and CEO of Zuellig Nutritional Group, is Chairman of the Board. Zeullig is one of the largest distributors and manufacturers of nutritional ingredients in North America.”
Stats on launch…
Mike: “We currently have 10 stores on the site. We’ll do our consumer launch October 1st. At that time, we’ll have 30 stores on the site” [Editor’s Note: The site currently lists 36 stores including VitaminShoppe, Drugstore.com, and MotherNature.com].
Gerd: “We have 12,000 products – mostly vitamins and supplements and a smaller amount related to sports nutrition. We plan to move into skin care products, OTC drugs, and pharmaceuticals. We could also get into services: things like health insurance or health plans, weight loss plans, exercise plans, etc. Anything that’s related to health and wellness. Eventually, we could also list medical products. Supplements are a starting point.”
How does the feed work?
Gerd: “We keep the feed very simple, only asking for main product information (SKU, price, UPC code, and a link to product page). We then go out and spider the sites and analyze the content. Most sites have the content in an unstructured way. We take the information and structure the content. A lot of the merchants have nutritional fact sheets available online. We scrape it and put the ingredients in a relational database. This empowers us to give consumers a more powerful service where they can compare vitamins and supplements side by side.”
Do you have relationships with all the stores or are you just scraping their site or joining their affiliate program?
Mike: “We have agreements in place before we touch the sites.”
Did you develop the system yourself or did you license someone’s technology?
Gerd: “We have a great development team and developed everything in house. We use open source software.”
Why do it in house?
Gerd: “Our system provides us with the ability to not only take the data and put it into a structured format but also to look at the data and come up with new data based on existing information. Here’s an example: When someone searches for an ingredient, let’s say iron, there are 15 forms of iron available. We apply business logic to turn that into more consumer understandable data. If you do a search on Shopping.com or the other comparison engines, they don’t do the best job of aggregating the product. You will find the same product many times on the same page because of naming conventions. This creates obstacles for the consumers to understand. We spend a lot of time making products comparable through looking at the nutritional information. Also, there are certification companies which look at manufacturer processes, and we provide that certification information. If there are three bottles of Vitamin A in front of you, this information could mean a big difference in terms of how your body consumes the product.”
Mike: “We have partnerships with certification bodies and organizations. We’re the first to bring that information to the consumer. These organizations test the products to make sure that if a manufacturer says that a product has ingredient Z, that there actually is Z in the product. We bring this information up on the site.”
Gerd: “We have developed a piece of technology that allows us to recommend similar products based on ingredients. For example, if the consumer has a multivitamin product in mind with 10 specific ingredients and wants to find alternative, how do they find the product? We’ve developed an algorithm that looks at the ingredients and then looks in our database for an alternative that would be good.”
You seem to work on a commission structure while most comparison engines work on a PPC basis. Why?
Mike: “Yes, we’re on a bounty or commission based revenue model today. We do have affiliate agreements. Our plans are to go to PPC. We built it this way just to get to market faster. Our feeling is that if you’re going to be successful with the consumers, you first need the retailers on board. As our volume goes up we’ll build the PPC engine.”
How do you set yourself apart from the major comparison engines?
Mike: “We’re taking a niche approach to information based comparison shopping. Everything starts general and goes specific. Health is a great place to look at. Initially, early adopters are price hunting, but prices are only a small part of HealthPricer. We’re much more concerned about what people are taking. HealthPricer is going to appeal to the health conscious, not price conscious. The breadth of health information is what differentiates the site.”
