ComparisonEngines

Introduction:
As Manish Chandra, President & CEO of Kaboodle told me “Kaboodle is a better way to collect, organize, and act on information.” Manish provided multiple examples of where Kaboodle comes in handy but making a purchase, planning a family trip, or looking at houses resonated with me the most.

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us provide a good way to collect information and see what’s popular in general, but Kaboodle provides a better way to organize and act on the information. As Manish explained “with in depth research, you need a richer summary than social bookmarking. If you’re just looking at one site, bookmarking is fine, but as soon as you look at fragmented information, bookmarking becomes difficult.” Kaboodle solves this problem by bringing together information from multiple websites on a single page.

I’ve kaboodled about shopping comparison engines and notebook computers.

While del.icio.us has taken off with the early adopters, it has not moved past that crowd. I think Kaboodle has the potential to cross the chasm much sooner because it’s just simpler to use and adds more value to the decision making process.

“We have built technology to summarize a page on a random site. Our approach – inverted search – is where we take all the information on a page, process it, and identify what could possibly be pictures, descriptions, prices, news, etc. We also put a rank in with each attribute. The power is that when you correct it, the system will learn with you. There’s a ‘wisdom of a crowd’ effect where you don’t have to explicitly train it, but others will correct it for their own reasons.” Put into english – kaboodle didn’t take the right description for the Latitude X1 notebook computer, but I easily fixed the details and helped anyone else out who kaboodles on a dell product page.

As Om Malick stated in his post on Kaboodle “Say you are researching buying a 32-inch LCD television. You go to ten different websites, not to mention uber-comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com or Nextag. These sites give you a good over view of the best price. Often that information is not enough. You click, and go to say, J&R World, where you find all the information. If you are like me, then you essentially print out everything, and do the comparison and make your purchase. (Of course you can toggle between many different screens, and that’s not much fun.) Kaboodle does one better – it places all the “digital scraps” on a single page, and allows you to add tags to that page. In other words, it lets you built a tiny personal shopping page. “

Is the social shopping experience provided by Kaboodle useful for the comparison engines?
Right now, Kaboodle isn’t working with any comparison engines, but it’s easy to see Kaboodle becoming an affiliate and adding a ‘buy it now’ button on every relevant kaboodle. I set up my notebook computer kaboodle because I wanted to gather all my research and feedback in one place before making a purchase. Obviously, I’m further down the buying cycle because of my kaboodle which means that a merchant is going to get a very qualified buyer.

Kaboodle becoming an affiliate is one thing, but how about Kaboodle being integrated into a comparison engine? The main shopping engines have ‘wish lists’ which you can share with friends, but not all have the functionality – emailing the list, aggregating data from multiple sources, allowing for votes, etc. – that Kaboodle provides. More importantly, while Yahoo! Shopping and Froogle are pushing wish lists and adding important associated functionality, NexTag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber don’t really make their wish lists as readily accessible.

I think that Kaboodle could be an important component to one of these shopping engines. BUT it’s a risk. As I said in my previous post introducing social shopping, a lot of the engines have been set up to monetize the user as much as possible either through driving clicks to multiple merchants or through driving sponsored link (Adwords ads) clicks. Why educate the user if you can make money by getting rid of the user as quickly as possible?

Because NexTag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber get a ton of traffic from PPC advertising, they are going to be especially concerned about monetization per user. I think that’s why you don’t see them pushing people to sign up for accounts, save products, and do any form of social shopping. Yahoo! Shopping and Froogle, on the other hand, don’t pay for traffic and therefore might be able to concentrate more on the user experience. In this respect, I would argue that Yahoo! Shopping and Froogle have a long term point of view…and that’s the mindset the rest of the comparison engines have to grok for a deal with Kaboodle to make sense. Spending millions of dollars on keyword buying is not an effective long term strategy. NexTag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber have to work on building loyal users. Kaboodling might be one way to do this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Comparison Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.