Thank you to…
-Yahoo! (especially Jeanne Condit & Havi Hoffman) for hosting the event and providing the munchies
-Beach for organizing the event
-David Weinrot (Shopzilla), Chris Saito (Yahoo! Shopping), Siva Kumar (TheFind), and Neil Mayle (BrowseGoods) for participating
-Everyone for attending!
-SD Forum & Jeff Clavier (the Chair of the Search SIG)
-and the Academy…
Here’s some coverage of the event…
-DJCline
-Siva Kumar
-Freshelectrons (Havi helped launch Yahoo! Shopping back in ’98!)
Someone’s anonymous notes/thoughts…
SDForum ‘Search’ SIG meeting, at Yahoo Sunnyvale
Tuesday Feb 13, 2007
Moderator:
Brian Smith (www.comparisonengines.com)
Panel:
Chris Saito (Yahoo! Shopping)
David Weinrot (Shopzilla)
Siva Kumar (TheFind)
Neil Mayle (Dotted Pair)
Comments:
• Yahoo Sunnyvale is huge. Meeting held in Classroom C. Big enough to hold several hundred people. Maybe 150-200 there. The Shopzilla VP on the panel joked that his entire company could fit into it.
• My impression was that >50% of the people worked at Yahoo. They seemed older than the Googlers in general, and less cocky (not too hard to understand that, I guess).
• Session was led by Brian Smith of Comparison Engines. He was amusing and self-deprecatory – mentioned his background as a former stand-up comedian, said it was easy to be ‘the leading analyst in this space’ when you’re the only one.
• Some pretty funny technical problems, given where we were. Terrible feedback from the audio in the room, persisted for some time. Then the internet connection used for the demos was slow. When this happened during the Yahoo Shopping demo one wag suggested “Maybe it would run faster if we moved closer to Yahoo”.
• The Yahoo Shopping guy was trying to demo a results page, but no sooner had be started when he was interrupted by three huge pairs of disembodied legs dancing all over the page (a Circuit City ad). This unfortunately says a lot about Yahoo (and why I never use it).
• Shopzilla and Yahoo Shopping are conventional shopping comparison search engines. The Find is a start-up focusing on soft goods, has bigger pictures than the thumbnails shopping engines usually show. Dotted Pair has a uniquely visual approach – you look down on pictures of the products as if they were laid out on the floor of a gigantic aircraft hangar, and then zoom in on categories and eventually products in a Google Maps-like fashion.
• There was a discussion on crawling the web for price and product data versus feeds. Some of this, either for or by people unfamiliar with shopping search, was about the desirability of the one approach versus the other, as if they were exclusive or one was superior (not in my view a helpful or insightful perspective). Some more interesting observations though (phrases in quotes may be paraphrased):
- “You get more data from a crawl”. There’s often more information on the product web page than the merchant gets around to putting in his feed. You can get some or all of it if you take the time to direct your crawler accordingly.
- “Some sites are java-heavy or completely in Flash”. Makes you more reliant on crawling data feeds for those products.
- “You have to be careful what you mean by ‘crawling’ these days, it’s not always the same thing”. I think what TheFind’s CEO meant was that crawlers are increasingly sophisticated robots, don’t necessarily break with every change on their target sites.
- “Crawling throws up a frequency issue”. Some supplier sites have more unique product offerings than you can crawl every day, so you have to adopt a selective targeting and scheduling strategy.
- “Some offers [you acquire by crawling] may be ones the retailer doesn’t want to appear on your price comparison site”
- “More feeds are becoming available all the time, but you still have to make decisions about people who don’t have feeds”.
- Shopzilla’s VP made a point about how concentrated the demand can be (and presumably therefore how important it is to focus on getting a tiny subset of the offers right) – currently it seems that a single Canon digital camera accounts for over 4% of Shopzilla’s entire volume in the digital camera category.
- “Shopzilla is now all feeds [no crawling at all]“.
- I think myself you have to recognize that people start off using crawled data because that’s what they’ve got. Feeds come later on, when you’ve attracted enough users that the suppliers will pay attention to you, and become more important subsequently when you can begin to influence what data comes to you in the feed.
• Revenue models:
- It emerged that all four companies started with an affiliate model (e.g. Amazon), progressing (or planning to progress) to other revenue sources over time.
- There was a funny exchange about Adsense as a revenue source, when the Shopzilla guy said “that’s not really what we are about”, but Brian Smith then appeared to drop in the observation that if you read the S-1 filings of the public shopping engines (of which Shopzilla is one, via Scripps) you find that Adsense is as much as 40% of their revenue.
- The Yahoo Shopping guy said that Yahoo Shopping is now focused (like Shopzilla) on cost per click, as opposed to their earlier emphasis on cost per action, which he described as “heavyweight” (I assume this means “difficult to get to work properly”).
- There was a fascinating little difference of opinion over putting Adsense ads on shopping engine results pages. TheFind’s CEO was firmly against it on the basis that if people clicked on the ads that would suggest that the organic results weren’t good enough, driving people not to return to the site. This was silly, and made him sound like someone who doesn’t yet have either users or data to think about, and is still focusing on getting his demo right. The guy from Yahoo Shopping in particular tried to gently point out to him that they have lots of data which establishes that the ads in fact add to the user experience and increase the number of clicks on the page. Shopzilla seems to work seriously on improving the relevance of the ads beyond what would normally be triggered by the content on the page.
- Yahoo Shopping’s representative also pointed out that “having Adsense Yahoo! Search Marketing listings on the page also helps to monetize unpaid listings”.
- Brian Smith asked the panel about whether they were seeing a shift over time in the shopping engine space from delivering price comparisons for particular products towards “what to buy”. I was glad I was sitting down when the Shopzilla VP gave his answer, because he said (paraphrase alert): “we think ‘what to buy’ will be delivered by [I think he might have said "belongs to"] deep vertical sites like DP Review ( www.dpreview.com), plus a million other opportunities to do the same thing in other areas”. He also mentioned a recent talk in which either Larry or Sergei at Google were said to have shown their audience DP Review, saying (if I understood him) something like “we can’t compete with this, in this product category or any number of other ones”. The reason I found this such a startling response is that Shopzilla, Shopping.com and Kelkoo (now part of Yahoo) are all large businesses (all of them sold for over $400 million), and all of them have a lot of resources and are competing as hard as they can in the shopping engine space. And yet it seems that all that gets them is a privileged insight into the fact that in terms of sites addressing vertical categories and ‘what to buy’ (the eventual margin prospects for which have to be way better than something which just squeezes margins ever lower) they are nowhere! Wow. Truly those who say we are still only in the first innings in search have it right.
- Somebody asked about integrating content from vertical sites. Somebody on the panel (Shopzilla?) said yes, makes sense to integrate blogs in relevant product areas, good way to integrate user-generated content.
- Shopzilla appeared to announce that they will be providing outbound feeds and associated monetization opportunities (‘syndicated content’) to product-focused sites and blogs.
• There was a question on the role of affiliate programs, which the Shopzilla guy felt were “due for a renaissance” in association with the rise of vertical sites. “Don’t forget that Adsense is the mother of all affiliate programs”.
• I asked the last question of the panel myself, about whether page load times on shopping comparison sites are stuck where they are, or likely to see significant improvement. They seemed inclined to pass this off as a reference to the earlier connection speed issues, but in fact it’s a perfectly reasonable question (Shopzilla just took 7 seconds to load its reponse to my query on ‘Minolta digital cameras’). Overall, and especially given the nature of the two start-ups present, my impression is that the participants in this space are focused on increasing use of graphics (and even video), and on keeping page load times constant as their databases grow, rather than on aiming for any sort of dramatic step improvement in page load times.
[...] ss Blogging Posted by Brian Smith at February 16th, 2007 Ok, in my post re-capping the Search SIG, I posted someone’s notes abou [...]