ComparisonEngines

A week ago I posted that I was looking for an office. Today, I’m sitting in that office.

Ethan Stock, Founder & CEO of Zvents, a vertical search engine focused on local events and activities which just raised $7m in Series A Funding, saw my post and sent me an email offering up some cube space at NetService Ventures (NSV), the firm which funded his company (Ethan is a partner at NSV).

Met with Ethan last Friday and then met with Richard Melmon & Hiroshi Menjo, Managing Partners at NSV, on Tuesday. We had a great conversation that somehow ended with me being offered a cube. The guys here at NSV seem super smart and I owe them a BIG thanks for welcoming me into their family.

It’s kind of an entrepreneur’s dream come true. Office space for SingleFeed with a venture and consulting firm on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. I’m around to contribute in any way I can and in return I get a little nook without a cappuccino machine screaming in the background. I don’t know what Starbucks is going to do without me!

Ethan, Rich, Hiroshi and the rest of the NSV team (as well as the Zvents team)…THANKS!

Shopzilla was returning this message for product searches for a bit this morning. The problems seems to have been solved, but this has to hurt! Sent an email to find out more.

Thanks to everyone who sent me a heads up (including Home Decor Products).

I’ve started to recommend Google Checkout to a number of small businesses. I have 3 criteria for making the recommendation:

1. The merchant does little to no in-house email marketing (promotional, monthly newsletter, community building [thanks, Dave], etc.)
2. The merchant makes little to no money through upsells
3. The merchant has little to no repeat business

Ok, I guess there’s a 4th criteria…thinking short term and only about top line revenue growth. Ok. Ok. You know my opinion on this one.

Even with the $50K? $100K? in free AdWords clicks Google Checkout is throwing around, I still can’t make sense of this for an internet retailer 400 (or 2000 if there was such a list) merchant. Unless Checkout passes back the email address of the customer for 80%+ of the purchases, has amazing upsell functionality (which I know is in the works), and offers a short term contract, I just don’t think it makes sense.

However, as consumer adoption increases (with more promotions like the $10 of any purchase of $30 or more) and merchants are pressured to show top line revenue growth in line with the industry average, I have a feeling that more and more large merchants will take the plunge. And a free month of AdWords clicks plus free credit card processing is a hefty incentive.

Related Posts:
Shopping.com To Test Universal Shopping Cart – October 6

Update: Danny beat me to the punch with his review of Like.com. Of course, Techcrunch has now posted as has GigaOM. Don’t worry, I’ll add my thoughts soon.

Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret of the WSJ break the news.

Walt and Katherine focus on the ‘looking like a star’ aspect, but there’s a ton more to talk about.

I’ll write more in the morning, but Like is one of three concepts that have really blown me away since I started covering the shopping search space. Congrats to Munjal and his team on launching.

Like.com is down right now, but I’m sure it’ll be back up in the early morning…

[Beth, thanks for making the introduction]

ComparisonEngines – resource to learn about the shopping comparison engine industry.
SingleFeed – affordable service for data feed submisison (oh, and we have a slick new design if you haven’t visited in a while).

And introducing…

LoveYourFeed – resource for data feed optimization and data feed submission. Available to any and every merchant submitting feeds to the shopping comparison engines. Yes, the site will cover data feed optimization strategies, but it’ll also cover what’s happening on the shopping engines that might effect merchants. You know, things like outages, changes to the merchant center, how to handle click fraud, and much much more. I think the main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) have done a great job of communicating with webmasters…hopefully LoveYourFeed will become a place for the shopping comparison engines to communicate with data feed gurus.

So check out LoveYourFeed. If you want to contribute to or advertise on LoveYourFeed, shoot me an email (‘brian at loveyourfeed dot com’).

A big thanks to:
-Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal for letting me ‘steal’ his basic design.
-Lucas Sawyer of Lucas Sawyer Consulting for taking care of the blog
-Telic Media for being my first advertiser (yes, I said advertiser…only took me about 18 months)
-Become.com for offering my readers $25 in free clicks for setting up a new account

Yahoo! Shopping made a number of changes to it’s site in preparation for the holidays.

The Yahoo! Shopping Blog has a complete rundown of the changes (here and here). Probably won’t get to a full write up until the weekend…sorry Matt, Chris, & Haley.

New:

Old:

-Think of this like dating…if I’m interested I’ll call you back.
Sending me one email is accpetable. Assuming I don’t respond, you might want to follow up with a second email. Assuming I still don’t respond, do not send me a third email.

-Get a corporate email address and use it. If you work for a PR firm, you’re set. If you’re independent and you send me an email from a gmail or yahoo or hotmail address, my immediate impression is that you’re an outsider and not the right person to be speaking to me about the company/service.

-If you work for a PR firm, make sure that I don’t get 2 or 3 or even 4 people pitching me the same story. It reflects poorly on your firm and the company you represent.

-Don’t use the phrase ‘here’s what other popular bloggers are saying about us…” and then quote TechCrunch, GigiOm, etc. I have a blog reader and have set up at least 300 news search alerts on Google/Yahoo!, if you’re in the online shopping space, I probably know about you. Also, I’m an analyst who is going to form my own opinion so sharing quotations from Michael Arrington doesn’t do it for me.

-Don’t try to explain the industry to me unless you think I’ve gotten something completely wrong.

-Read my blog at least for a couple minutes. Search for a couple keywords related to your industry or your company. Maybe even search for your company name…I know, what a wacky concept! Approaching me by striking up a conversation as opposed to just sending me the one-sided ‘this is why our company is changing the world’ pitch.

I just found out that somehow I accidentally unsubscribed 245 of my email subscribers. Ahhh…not really sure what I can say except…sorry about that. If you’re reading this, welcome back!

1 cube needed (for me) with possibly 2 or three more cubes needed in the next couple months. The rest of SingleFeed is scattered (strategically!) around the country (NYC, Chicago, and in the next week or so, Salt Lake City).

Before I sign with one of these ‘instant workspace’ companies, I was wondering if there are any merchants, VCs, Analysts, fans/groupies, etc. (basically anyone but a shopping comparison engine – don’t think readers would view that as remaining independent) who could offer me a great deal on rent. Access to T1 Connection required.

I’d like to be in Palo Alto/Menlo Park, but I’m not going to be that picky.

[and Sam, I owe you a call]

Thanks!
-b

You might think it’s a bit early, but it’s not.

With Halloween over, the holidays are just around the corner. Whether or not the BIG day is Black Friday or Cyber Monday, people start shopping today. In a couple weeks, we’ll see top 10 lists of most popular products, and by the end of the month, a slew of new feature will have been rolled out by the shopping comparison engines b4 code freezes take effect.

Last year MSN Shopping was the first to launch its holiday shopping section (November 3 or 4), with Yahoo! Shopping right on its heels.

While the complete holiday section/theme hasn’t rolled out yet, it looks like once again MSN Shopping is the first to ring in the holidays, launching its gift section nice and early.