Considering that CEO Sergei Burkov is not getting back to me, I have to assume that Dulance has shut its doors. Which is very very odd to say. The history of shopping comparison engines is a very very positive story. Yes, there were some hickups along the way, but in general, every shopping comparison engine which had a VC investment over the last 11 years had a successful exit:
Jango acquired by Excite ($35m)
Junglee acquired by Amazon ($250m)
C2b acquired by Inktomi Product Search ($90m)
MySimon acquired by CNET ($350m $700m…sorry Michael!)
Dealtime/Epinions formed SDC acquired by eBay ($476m)
Bizrate renamed Shopzilla acquired by EW Scripps ($560m)
PriceGrabber acquired by Experian ($485m)
NexTag acquired by… ($850m+)
And the shopping comparison engines, IMHO, are at the beginning of a strong growth period which will see them morph into more comprehensive/relevant and therefore more powerful shopping search engines.
People talk of Google kicking Yahoo’s ass back in the day because Google’s search results were an order of magnitude better than Yahoo’s search results. The top shopping comparison engines, while profitable, growing businesses, have been sputtering along in terms of merchant adoption, which adversely effects their ability to develop a shopping engine an order of magnitude better than plain old Google or Yahoo! search results. Most shopping comparison engines only have around 5,000 feeds. This is due to 2 factors.
First, data feeds are difficult to create, submit, and manage compared to the relatively easy to deal with Adwords and YSM ads. Data feeds take a lot of time and effort to set up and because each comparison engine has different required fields and unique categories, it can take 2 hours to set up each feed. Then merchants have to deal with submission which many times comes down to a FTP upload. File Transfer Protocol is one way to read that. Fuc%&*# Troublesome Process is another, especially if you’re a small business with no tech resources.
Second, because most shopping comparison engines have price floors, they automatically limit the number of products which merchants will submit or will continue to submit to shopping comparison engines. If I sell an Ademco 940 Surface Contact for $2.89 with a 52% margin, that means I make $1.50 per sale. Unfortunately, many of the shopping engines put me in an electronics category with a minimum bid of $0.50. That means that I’d have to convert a sale once every three clicks for the channel to be profitable. HA! I’m the first to admit that shopping comparison engines can convert well, but a 33% conversion rate is not going to happen.
Fix just one of these 2 factors, and merchant adoption will rise, leading to more comprehensive/relevant comparison engines which wouldn’t need to supplement results with Google Adsense. These engines might even become the starting point for shoppers (imagine not having to spend all your marketing dollars to acquire shoppers through Adwords and YSM). Froogle, which I’ve been critical of in the past has amassed around 50,000 merchant feeds (no confirmation, just an estimate) and therefore has a very comprehensive database of products. If it weren’t for the infestation of affiliate and pornographic spam as well as a poor overall user experience (shipping costs and stock status should be required fields in the Froogle field), Froogle could be the top shopping comparison engine and an awesome service. But I digress…the point is, by not imposing price floors (Froogle is free), Froogle has gone from the standard 5,000 feeds to somewhere around 50,000. Let’s say that 50% of those feeds are clean and provide accurate and useful information…Froogle should theoretically have a much more comprehensive database of merchants and products than Shopping.com, NexTag, and PriceGrabber.
Which brings me back to Dulance and similar shopping search engines which don’t depend on merchant feeds but rather crawl the web for merchants and associated products. These shopping engines don’t impose price floors and get paid through affiliate programs or reasonable pay per click fees. Which means that these services can move past 5,000 merchants, past 50,000 merchants, and maybe past 100,000 merchants…hitting the long tail and possibly becoming an order of magnitude better than the current field of shopping comparison engines. Yes, there are still many issues to deal with around building an incredible user experience, but hopefully you’re getting the picture.
Dulance, according to Sergei, was a 2nd generation comparison engine because of the breadth of merchant coverage. While we’re still living in a 1st generation comparison engine world, I’m a believer that services like Dulance will soon become a powerful force in e-commerce. Shopzilla recognizes this as the company is supplementing its feeds with crawled results. Shopping.com as far as I’m able to tell, doesn’t recognize this. Shopping.com has the ability to crawl a site, but it charges $750 to do so…if Shopping.com believed in becoming a 2nd generation shopping search engine and providing the best shopping search experience possible, the company would cut this fee to just south of $0.01.
I don’t know how good Dulance’s technology is, but maybe the 1st generation shopping comparison engines should call up Sergei and check out his assets.
Ok, now that I’ve made the case for 2nd generation comparison engines, critical readers should be thinking I’m crazy… “how can Brian be such an evangelist for 2nd generation shopping engines after one of the first pure-play 2nd generation comparison engine just folded?” Good question. More to come…
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Related Posts:
Dulance – The Long Tail – What Happens When You Move Past Feeds – July 20, 2005
Where’s Dulance? – March 26, 2006
An excellent posting. This is very much along the lines of what we’re doing with our ScrapbookFinds site (http://www.scrapbookfinds.com/). We handle no data feeds, but instead crawl sites to populate our database. This means the data is very accurate and fresh. Our screen-scraper technology (http://www.screen-scraper.com/) also allows us to set up sites to be crawled in a relatively short period of time.
I’d be interested to hear about other revenue models. We currently primarily make use of affiliate programs, and have considered adding a PPC model. We also recently added AdWords, but are debating about keeping them. Has anyone else seen success with other methods?
will you be doing a story on the shoplocal/Cairo suit and subsequent closing of Cairo.com as well?
i’m sure you already saw this, but just to reaffirm, the WHOIS database says Dulance is INactive but regisatry status is active (expires Sept 3 06)
Interesting model, Todd. Like you, I find niche shopping to be more rewarding than a general mall. I admire the ease of upkeep of such an automated data-entry system. It does leave me wanting a bit more as a consumer though– where are the price comparisons between retailers? It seems less of a comparison shopping service and more of a Froogle type data aggregator.
With my model (see http://www.supplementjudge.com/supplements/MuscleTech/GAKIC.html) I use both scraping and datafeeds; however, I integrate each one with my own item ID system– allowing price comparisons and easy upkeep of price changes. For my major sources of data/products, I setup scraping algorithms for quick imports of new products. The monetization model is purely affiliate.
Hi,
I remember looking at Dulance.com a long time ago, but can’t recall their key differentiation points. Can anyone tell me what they were doing that was innovatiive? Also, I’m currently building my own comparison site, anyone know where a good price comparison script can be purchased? …or any experienced programmers interested in helping us build one?
Thanks,
John
Thanks for the reply, Alex. We’re actually in the process of enhancing the site to allow for comparison of identical or similar products. The difficulty is that, oftentimes, the same two products are named differently. As such, we’re formulating some complex algorithms for determining similarity between products by examining various attributes (including the name, of course).
It looks like you’ve done a good job on your site of allowing for comparisons. Do you mind sharing a bit how you went about it? How does your item ID system work? Are you manually associating products together, or do you have some way of automating that? Unfortunately, for us, automation is the only answer given that we currently have about 60K products in our database. Also, just out of curiosity, how are you handling the scraping? Have you simply written custom code for each site?
John, we’ve done a number of meta-search engines. You can check out our technology at http://www.screen-scraper.com/. If you’re interested in furthering the discussion, feel free to drop me an email. My address is my first name at screen-scraper.com. We’re probably in a good position to help you out.
Kind regards,
Todd Wilson
The product name matching between retailers is a huge difficulty. My only method right now is manual– I have a script that does some intelligent matching, suggests the closest alternatives, and makes it a 1-click process. It is still quite tedious. I do think it depends on the niche though. I’m confident that if I were dealing in electronics or something else where all retailers use the same model/manufacturer numbers, the product ID matching could be 95% automated. With scrapbooking, I understand your dilemma. The brands might not be the same, yet the product is nearly identical– do you allow a comparison even though not an exact match? Tricky stuff.
The scraping is also custom written for each site. I’d never heard of a tool such as your screen-scraper and I will certainly look into it. As I’m expanding to other niches, I see myself working on something more advanced like that where there is less manual intervention for new retailers. Supposedly Healthpricer.com does a similar sort of scrape, taking in unformatted nutritional information and such. I am a one-man team though so my attention to each detail is limited. That does increase the profitability though– at only 8 months old, my site is more successful than Healthpricer.com with a team of 16 people. I’ve found a much better ROI by concentrating on high margin goods rather than feeling I must have every single product available.
Sounds like you’ve already found a lot of success, Alex. That’s fabulous.
Handling comparisons definitely is one of the trickier issues we’ve run up against. Fortunately, we have a guy on staff who specializes in this kind of thing, so it’s just a matter of time. In answer to your question, yes, we’ll be allowing for comparisons even if it’s not an exact match. We’re anticipating it will be a type of spectrum of similarity. We could allow the user to set it, but we may also just display products that are 90% similar, for example.
Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to chat about the screen-scraping aspect of your operation. If costs are an issue, we also offer a completely free edition of our software that may do the trick for you. My email address is my first name at screen-scraper.com.
Hi,
Interesting article, and comments, and I have some thoughts… Tokenizer is crawler-based (sorry for copywriting); try to search AMD (or, for instance, Thinkpad X60) at Tokenizer and other similar sites… Only(!) 120 large stores are partially(!) indexed, and almost the same amount of search results comparing to competitors (including crawler-based)… I can add more stores, but need to tune engine at first, and to make website brilliant.
I’ll easily add category next week; it will be “Faceted Browsing” similar to shopping.com; it’s not a problem.
About product names: of course it IS possible to employ similarity algorithm , but if merchant wants to publish a suffix ***Free Shipping*** or even ***Refurbished*** I need to scrap it.
About “comparison”: currently, cheapest Lenovo prices are directly at Lenovo! (I mean top-notch products only).
Thanks
P.S.
this is second POST attempt, some SQL errors…
Hi everybody!
I have a few things in mind about shopping comparison. I buy many products using shopping comparison websites and I think their are the best thing that happend to e-commerce; I mean let’s face it we all gone throught moments when we bought something and we didn’t get the exact product or we didn’t get it at all, althought we paid for it.
Shopping comparison essentialy help you to filter the stores to the ones that are serious and legal and to filter the prices, to buy the product at the best price.
There are many things to say about shopping comparison, but those are the basics (at least what i look for..)
Best Regards!