A problem (and therefore an opportunity for innovators) with shopping through the shopping comparison engines is that you only get 2 experiences. First, the defining normalization/SKUing up format which is most prevalent for electronics but has creeped into other categories like Home & Garden and Watches. Second, the shopping search format for ’soft’ goods in which the shopping comparison engines are just starting to dedicate more resources to tackle the really difficult problem of determining relevance for a search like ‘red sweater’.

These experiences are good as they act as a common denominator AND a way to get people to click on paid listings ASAP. However, they aren’t necessarily the best way to search, browse, and shop for all products. You don’t think about the same things when buying a baseball (Go Mets!) as you do when buying a diamond ring (Go VVS1, 1.5 Carat, Princess?!?). While the attribute extraction work the shopping comparison engines are doing are helpful for all products, attribute extraction alone doesn’t necessarily provide the optimal experience for all products searches.

At eTail, Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti talked about Amazon’s Create Your Own Ring section as an example of how Amazon is innovating the shopping experience for it’s users. Personally, I love what Amazon has put together here…so much so that I originally entitled this post A Better Way to Shop (For Diamonds) as opposed to A Different Way To Shop (For Diamonds). The reason for the less bold title is that this experience is clearly not for everyone. I sent an email to about 20 recent diamond purchasers or people I know who are in the market and the reactions were all over the place.

Which is probably one of the reasons why the established shopping comparison engines stick with the lowest common denominator look and feel circa 1999. Another reason is that ‘verticalizing’ the experiences isn’t scalable (obviously).

So the reason for this post isn’t to encourage the shopping engines to do something radically different, but rather test different user experiences on some of their smaller, less well known domains. One approach is to think about this from a vertical/category perspective. If something seems to resonate with a particular audience, you can then slowly rollout that experience on your main site.

Related Posts
Sprenzy Launches - August 31, 2006
Mpire in NYTimes - August 14, 2006
Sortprice - Same Shopping Search, Different User Experience - August 9, 2006
Think Different - July 31, 2006
If Banana Republic Can Do It… - July 25, 2006
Stylehive Raises $2.62m - July 25, 2006
ShopWiki - Shop By Color - June 14, 2006

SingleFeed - Web Application Developer (FT/PT)
SingleFeed will provide small and medium sized merchants with a better way to manage data feeds and help merchants achieve success on the shopping comparison engines.

We’re seeking a serious web application developer, with experience in building flexible, scaleable web applications. We require 1-2 years of professional experience using
- Perl(CGI/mod_perl),
- JavaScript(Ajax/Json),
- CSS(cross browser) and
- MySQL (data modeling and ANSI SQL).

Additional consideration will be given to candidates with following experience:
- XML(Xslt/Xpath, Web Services, DTD/XML Schema),
- Linux system administration experience, including Apache customization, configuration, DNS

We’re also looking for 1 or more part timers with some of the skills above who can make minor changes to SingleFeed. This person must have experience working in an environtment with lots of Perl generated web pages and CSS.

Send a resume (as a word attachment) to ‘brian at singlefeed dot com’.

ChannelAdvisor - Chief Financial Officer
The road to an IPO includes many sign posts. I remember my experience at VarsityBooks (now VarsityGroup) as we ramped up for our IPO. There’s the requisite BIG bizdev deal (in our case a partnership with AIM/ICQ), pre-road show investment conference tour as the company flirted with the investment banks, and the hiring of a real CFO. Well, CA has branched out from it’s relationship with eBay and cozied up with Google (Scot Wingo even posted a glowing review of GCheckout on GCheckout’s blog), CA speaks at all the investment conferences and Scot has become the go to guy for any analyst who wants insight into eBay, and now the company is hiring a CFO with the requisite pre-IPO company responsibilities:

-Investor Relations/IPO Prep
• Prepare company for a potential IPO, including Sarbanes Oxley compliance
• Advance the company’s relationship with the financial community. Manage relationships with the financial community and investors.
• Keep the financial community current on company performance and industry trends.

The CFO’s responsibilities also include M&A/Financing.
Read the complete job description.

ShopWiki - Swedish, Italian, Dutch, French, and Spanish Writers
With a little money in its pockets, ShopWiki will be aggressively moving into Europe later this year (if these job postings are any indication). The company is looking for bilingual writers who are fluent in English and Italian, Dutch, Swedish, French, or Spanish who will ‘write comprehensive buying information for people in these countries’.

Read the complete Swedish, Italian, and Dutch job description.
Read the complete Frech and Spanish job description.

Kaboodle - Director of Product Management
Think different. Think Kaboodle. The company is mixing things up a bit with new features, so this job could be a blast. The Director of Product Management ‘would be personally responsible for driving forward progress on all Kaboodle product strategy and definition and would work closely with a talented UI designer and a dream team of developers. They need someone who is comfortable working in a fast-paced, self-directed startup culture.’

Move on this one quickly.
Send a resume (as an attachment) to ‘brian at kaboodle-inc dot com’.

If you have jobs available, you can post them here for free. Just read this page for instructions.

We all have a cell phone so I think it will eventually become a great shopping tool. There are several companies trying to wiggle into this space in several different ways. Just wanted to catch you up on some of the latest moves.

GPShopper & Channel Intelligence (CI)
These guys announced their partnership a couple weeks back. The release (put out by Channel Intelligence) touts the company’s SellCore Platform Solutions ‘expansion into the mobile market’. Sellcore is CI’s data feed management and optimization service for retailers. It’s not clear from the press release how this service is being offered to merchants - is it free? an upsell? - or if any of CI’s clients are going to participate in the partnership. While the retailers which take part won’t get much traffic from GPShopper (becuase GPShopper requires a user to download an application), it’s a nice differentiator for CI as retailers have probably thought about mobile but have no idea how to execute. As for GPShopper, it would be a big publicity win for the company if it could advertise that Circuit City, Discovery Channel, Baby Center, and Northern Tool (and more of CI’s clients) are available through the application.

Frucall Update
As I think about mobile shopping more and more, I end up drinking a lot of Frucall kool-aid. And I have to say it tastes great. Why? Because Frucall doesn’t require me to do anything new or different like download an application. Frucall doesn’t even require me to send a text message. Which means that the opportunity for Frucall is massive…everyone who knows how to use a cell phone can use Frucall as opposed to some other services which rely on the cell phone user needing some sort of data service. And yes, cell phone users are rapidly adopting data services (these services are key to the survival of the wireless providers), but penetration is still low.

Ok, as for the announcements, I have some catching up to do.
-Frucall has integrated APIs from Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping, and StreetPrices (nice choices, Nasser!).
-Frucall introduced Frucall Text. Ok, I know I just got done saying that no one has data services, but for those of us who do, this is a great feature…basically, if you like what you hear through Frucall, you can get a text message with the information (retailers, prices).
-Frucall introduced ‘Buddy List Messenger’. This is the first mistake I’ve seen the company make as Frucall is positioning the buddy list as a social networking feature. When companies start to use buzz words like that, I start to lose interest. This isn’t your core competency, Frucall. Stay away from it.

Google & Neven Vision…Riya…Scanbuy.
Funny, one of my readers, Mark Evans from Telic Media told me about Neven Vision back in May. Guess I should have followed up on that one a bit sooner! Anyways, you can read News.com’s report on Google’s acquisition of Neven, and I’m sure Google will do very cool things with the technology, but I’m most excited about the potential commerce applications…especially for women. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard a girlfriend (or friend who is a girl) say to another girl ‘That looks great. Where did you get it? Who makes it?’ Neven Vision could make those questions unnecessary. With the Neven Vision technology, you could potentially just take a picture of the boots, dress, ring, or jeans with the digital camera on your phone and get recommendations of similar products (or eventually, when the product database is comprehensive enough, that exact product) plus comparison pricing information. Not clear if that’s where Neven Vision was going with its technology before the acquisition (I’m not the mobile whiz), but I love this idea. Seems very sci-fi to me.

But if you think it’s fiction, you’re wrong. Riya is going to launch a web version of this exact service in the next couple months. Since starting to cover online shopping, only three features/services have blown me away. Riya is one of those, and I haven’t even used the service yet. All I have to go on is Munjal Shah’s Riya 2.0 Roadmap post which includes the following screenshot.

The post also shows a ’search by color’ feature similar to what ShopWiki and Etsy offer. And of course, there’s mention of ’search by camera phone’. This is one company to watch out for. Definitely subscribe to Munjal’s blog and check out his ‘Questions about Riya and Google’ post for a little Neven Vision/Riya/Google background.

Ok, then there’s SCANBUY (I almost don’t want to post about them because they’ve capitalized all the letters in the company name. Grrrr.) I’m going to skip over Scanbuy Shopper because it’s a downloadable application. Sorry, but even cell phone users subscribing to data services aren’t going to deal with this…you need to get on the deck…so I’ll talk about this when they ink the deal with Verizon! It’s the same problem that GPShopper has.

But there’s hope for Scanbuy if they can just dumb down their solution.

I should be able to walk into a store, take a picture of a barcode, txt msg that picture to Scanbuy (thus avoiding the downloadable application), have them query their database, do a price comparison, and return results through a txt msg. I didn’t check with my cell phone industry friends to figure out why this is not happening right now, and I didn’t check with Scanbuy. I’m sure someone will put me in my place before morning, but right now the txt msg route seems much smarter than the downloadable application route.

Just a couple things to thing about in the wild world of mobile commerce.

Related Posts:
Mobile Shopping Search - Slifter/GPShopper - May 2, 2006
Frucall Q&A - Mobile Shopping Search - April 13, 2006

I swear I wrote this a couple months ago.

The eBay fee increase backlash is such an amazing opportunity for NexTag Stores, Amazon Marketplace, and PriceGrabber Storefronts. If I was a marketer at one of these companies, I’d be chompin’ at the bit to acquire eBay sellers with a special promotional fee for the next 3 months. This is a no-brainer.

I’d also create a bizdev deal with a website builder/ecommerce provider like HomeStead (ironically the backend of HomeStead’s ecommerce solution is ProStores, an eBay company!) to give these quaint ’storefront’ newbies a full service ecommerce store so I could take a small cut of every transaction. Then upsell them on the normal PPC listings on the shopping comparison engines as well as on Google and Yahoo!, a logo design, and all of the other things that GoDaddy/NetSol would push.

I’ve been recommending history/polisci books/articles (The Soul of Iran, The Persian Puzzle, James Fallow’s Declaring Victory in The Atlantic) for a bit as I think everyone in Silicon Valley is way too consumed with work. If you know a little French and are interested in another business/internet book, you should pick up Ils Ont Reussi Leur Start-Up: Le success story de kelkoo! which sounds great.

I’ve said it many times…if you’re not taking advantage of the optional fields in your datafeeds, then you’re missing out on potential traffic. While I’m sure someone’s reported on this somewhere in the blogosphere, Google Base is now pulling out bulk upload (datafeed) attributes (fields) and making them more prominent, allowing users to quickly refine their search options.

These refinement options seem to show up for all items on Google Base, but we’re going to concentrate on products.

Searching for ‘plasma tv‘ gives the following results:

After clicking on ‘Products’, users can interact with any of the drop down fields and click on ‘more options’ to add those refinements to the list:

I added the ‘more options’ attributes and then refined my search. If you don’t find any products in your search (in this case plasma tvs with price: $1300 - $3000, brand: sony, location: within 30 miles of 94025), you can click ‘clear’ next to any of the refinement options you selected:

Eventually, when you type in ’sony plasma tv $2000′ into Google, I’d assume a subset of the matching results from Google Base will be displayed, but that doesn’t currently happen.

From a merchant perspective, it’s time to use as many of those optional fields (for Google Base and all the other engines) as possible. Google Base happens to be the only shopping search engine which allows merchants to define their own attributes (optional fields). Here are Google’s instructions for setting up custom attributes. I’ve tested out the ’string’ type attribute with some success. If you want better results on the shopping engines, try optimizing your feed - it’s no longer good enough to just post all your products and expect your listings to be found.

From a consumer perspective, using the refinement options was fairly easy. The only problem I had with Google Base was when I searched for something new. Typing in ‘digital camera’ kept all the same attributes from my previous search so I was looking at digital cameras with price $1300 - $3000, brand: sony. Would be better if a new search cleared my previously selected options.

Related Resources:
Data feed optimization strategies for Google Base, Shopzilla, and the rest of the Shopping Comparison Engines.
Self-service, affordable data feed submission services from SingleFeed.

Related Posts:
Vast Launches Vacation Rentals Search - July 8, 2006

Data feeds are not easy to create.
Data feeds are not easy to update.
Data feeds are not easy to submit.
Oh, and data feeds are hard to spell - is it data feed or datafeed?

What a shocker that most merchants hate dealing with data feeds!

Ever since putting together my first data feed in January of last year, I realized there was an opportunity to help merchants learn to love their feeds. I didn’t realize how big an opportunity until ComparisonEngines.com took off and merchants started emailing me for assistance. I then talked to the shopping comparison engines and they told me that one major problem they faced was working with data feeds submitted by small and medium sized businesses that don’t have the expertise (technical or otherwise) to put together a clean datafeed.

And a business was born.

My team has developed a self-service online data feed management service with three initial goals:
1. Help small and medium sized merchants save time and resources getting up and running on multiple shopping comparison engines.
2. Educate all merchants on data feed optimization so they achieve a positive ROI through the shopping comparison engines.
3. Deliver the highest quality data feeds to the shopping comparison engines.

While we’re not quite ready to publicly share specifics of the business, we’re definitely ready to share the name of the company…

SingleFeed.
[Possible tagline: Hate your datafeed, we'll love it for you.]

We’ll open up the invitation only beta in the next couple days.

Related Posts:
A (Data Feed) Business - June 29, 2006

Anyone use a great cheap or better yet, free conference call service? Skype is one option, but the quality of the calls has not always been perfect for me. Freeconference.com seems to be an option.

Suggestions?

Thanks.
-b