ComparisonEngines

In my vision of the shopping (and a lot of other activities) in the future, I will have an intelligent agent which understands my preferences, knows the marketplace (price trends, consumer sentiment, etc.) and is always on the lookout for products, deals, reviews, recommendations from friends (this is where social networks/communities become really valuable), etc. which I’d be interested in. My agent understands the competitive landscape and makes sure that my buying decision is well informed. My agent would have the authority to haggle with a dealer/distributor/merchant and make purchases according to criteria that I set or that my agent learned over time. It might take a while for the agent to understand my preferences and there would definitely be work involved with setting up such a system, but we will get there.

The original shopping bots were set up in this way – go out and find the prices for all sellers of Cracked Rear View (Hootie and the Blowfish – 1995) and report back to me. The original agent system, though, cracked for a number of reasons…one of them being that the ‘wrappers’ built for MusicBoulevard or CDNow often broke when pages changed. Fast forward 11 years, and we have smarter crawlers which are more flexible and can somewhat intelligently return results from a free crawl. Additionally, we have RSS feeds which automatically send us data about products, including price change information. We can even set up accounts with different ‘agents’, such as myTriggers and be notified when an item is available at a certain price.

Add in ‘Attention Economy’ services like Root Markets and I won’t be going to BestBuy.com or Staples.com in the future. BestBuy or Staples will come to me (assuming I’ve added them to an approved list of vendors and they meet other qualifications I’ve set up through my agent – on time delivery success percentage of 94% or above, customer service response time of 2.2 hours or less, etc.).

The consumer empowerment view of the future makes Adware completely irrelevant and completely relevant at the same time. [bear with me...]

Adware 1.0 was/is a brilliant concept: Present an alternative choice at the right time. For example, if I search for a flight from SFO to JFK on Expedia, I should get an offer from United which says ‘save $20 on your flight to New York plus get 400 extra bonus miles if you book directly at United.com’. This is an attractive offer that makes complete sense for United and for the consumer. In the Adware 1.0 world, Expedia is definitely against how this offer shows up, a big pop up on Expedia.com advertising United.com’s better deal isn’t the most merchant friendly offering, but in an age of consumer empowerment, Expedia and every other provider has to learn to deal with this situation.

So I’m a proponent of the concept of Adware as a consumer. What happened between 2000 and 2005 was that the Adware industry was infiltrated by nefarious individuals who figured out that they could bundle their application with popular software programs without user consent. These programs had little or no restrictions in terms of frequency of pops and some vendors even made it nearly impossible to remove such programs. Free downloadable software applications, through which these programs were distributed, made the situation worse by accepting multiple downloadable applications in a bundle. A user would get a great application and get 7 pieces of adware. Not a great user experience. Additionally, Malware and other derivatives of Adware took advantage of computer vulnerabilities and were extremely aggressive in their activites, wreaking havoc on people’s computers.

It’s no wonder that Claria got out of the adware business and WhenU is dying an excruciating death (after fleecing investors out of $35m). Oh, and Yahoo! should be shot for providing life support to WhenU – every many WhenU pops are now comprised of Yahoo Sponsored Results.

There were and are some very clean and smart companies that have and continue to take advantage of Adware. Companies like SideStep didn’t bundle their application with other software programs, but rather made extremely valuable applications that users wanted to download. While SideStep’s Sidebar/Toolbar is clunky and bulky in it’s appearance, it provides travelers with a great benefit. Then there are 100s of toolbars which provide users with some benefit such as shopping comparison engine functionality. Vendio’s Dealio, SmartShopper, and Pronto’s Toolbar (ah, it’s gone?!? just a temporary design oversight) are great examples of this. I definitely consider these applications adware – as they are presenting me an ad for an alternative. I also consider these applications crude forms of my intelligent agent. Unfortunately, the presentation of some of these toolbars, or at least the presentation of the ‘offer/deal’, leaves a lot to be desired.

Enter Mpire’s new plugin. It presents an alternative choice at the right time, (as Mpire tracks more data) empowers the consumer to make a well informed decision, and has a low annoyance factor (no pop ups, big drop downs, etc.). In other words, I think Mpire has solved the presentation problem and has the potential to be a very sticky thorn in the side of merchants (going back to that Expedia example).

As you can see in the picture above, Mpire’s pricing shows up right ‘above’ BestBuy’s page and is more prominent than BestBuy’s pricing. But Mpire has not just provided competitive pricing information as the shopping toolbars do, but also gives the user colorful information around the purchase decision in the form of historical pricing, empowering the user to make a smart decision. If you click on the Mpire provided new or used price, you get additional information at the bottom of the page highlighting the pricing trend for the product:

“Mpire is providing value by offering decision support for consumers engaged in buying activity.” [consider this paraphrasing - I might have butchered what Matt Hulett was trying to explain to me].

The additional information also includes new price comparison information from Shopping.com (although I hope Mpire replaces Shopping.com with it’s own merchants at some point), auction information from eBay, Overstock, etc., and associated deals.

Next step would be to include alerts (already available on Mpire.com, but these aren’t powerful enough until Mpire extends past Shopping.com narrow set of listings. The company will have to get into crawling to really provide value in this area – they should talk with Shopwiki, FatLens (I mean TheFind, sorry), etc.), coupons (already available on Mpire.com, although not as comprehensive as offerings from BargainBetty), and a social shopping component (not really there yet, but Mpire could team up with Judy’s Book Dealbar – Judy’s Book is located right around the corner) or any number of other emerging social commerce companies. Interestingly, Vendio just announced their ‘community’ feature for Dealio in which they’re rewarding people for contributing deals.

So let me be very clear. I love the concept of adware, but hate the presentation of adware; SideStep/SmartShopper/Dealio type displays (taking up 1/3 of the screen or dropping down on you) made sense 5 years ago, but not today. I think that typical adware provides value to the user, but lacks the intelligent agent component – the color around the transaction – that Mpire is just starting to provide and will become the foundation for decision making in the not so distant future.

I think crude, but solid intelligent agents will emerge in 2007 as a replacement to the current set of adware applications. Companies like Mpire, Farecast, Zillow, and others that crunch a lot of numbers to provide actionable information like historical pricing and pricing predictions might lead the charge. Google and Yahoo obviously will also be players. The way kids/teens now interact (through their cell phones, Gaia Online, or MySpace) or how Hiro Protagonist (SnowCrash) interacted with the Metaverse, guarantees that social networking will play an important role in the future of these intelligent agents both as a source for information and as a distribution tool.

So as you trek through the wilds of online holiday shopping in 2006, jumping from site to site, searching for coupon codes, reading buying guides, stumbling upon social networks for community input, etc., know that in 3-5 years you’ll look back and laugh at how unintelligent our decisions once were.

Related Posts:
-SearchEngineJournal – Mpire Shopping Plugin: Market Analytics Distributed Across Thousands of Shopping Sites – November 22, 2006
-AuctionBytes – Mpire Discontinues eBay Selling Tools – November 22, 2006
-Mpire in NYTimes – August 14, 2006
-Mpire – Transparency & Empowerment – June 11, 2006

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 11:22 am 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.