ComparisonEngines

As Ina Steiner of AuctionBytes points out, Google launched its own Ecommerce Channel on YouTube.

Right now there are just two videos: How to setup Tax for Google Checkout and How to setup Shipping for Google Checkout.

Not so enticing thus far, but with Google’s ever growing ecommerce focus, I hope we’ll see much more than just simple how-to videos. Probably not a bad idea to subscribe to the channel.

And while you’re at it, you should also subscribe to the Google Merchant Blog.

In my post on Monday, I said that Bing and Sortprice were the only major shopping engines that had a ‘post on [insert your favorite social network]‘ feature. Well, Shopping.com shared in a comment that they’ve had this functionality for a while as well.

Sorry about that, SDC.

As Robert from SDC points out in the comment, this sharing feature also works for reviews, guides, and wishlists.

Update: This is for US merchants only at this point. Also, you must have an individual Google Merchant Center account – if you have multiple stores associated with your Google Merchant Center account or have a ‘parent’ account, this application will not work for you.

SingleFeed is alpha testing an application on Facebook that will allow you to list your top selling products on your Facebook Fan Page. Takes less than 5mins to get up and running. All you need is a Google Merchant Center data feed and a Facebook Fan page.

If you’re interested in testing out the application (it’s free, by the way!), just send me an email: ‘brian at singlefeed.com’

Thanks!
-b

While the economy is improving and retailers are starting to report better year over year results, Shopzilla is not going in the right direction. Today Shopzilla, part of Scripps Networks Interactive, reported revenue of $37.6M, a 16.6% or $7.5M drop from $45.1M a year ago. Segment profit of $4.9M, down from $7M a year ago, was the lowest I’ve seen since I started tracking the numbers back in Q1 of 2006 (although I’ve never found Q3 2006 segment profit without uSwitch). Read the entire earnings release.

The press release says “Direct leads to Shopzilla merchant partners grew 11 percent year over year during the quarter.” But if direct leads to merchants grew by 11% and revenue dropped 16%, that means the value of those direct leads dropped, or put another way, Shopzilla is collecting less money per lead or per click. That’s not good. So what’s going on? Well, what’s not in the numbers is the traffic acquisition costs – revenue that is split with Shopzilla partners. So Shopzilla might be driving more direct leads to merchants, but it’s not necessarily doing so from Shopzilla or BizRate. I don’t have comScore numbers handy, but Compete shows that over the last year, unique users to Shopzilla and BizRate have dropped significantly.

Have to listen to the earnings call this weekend and see if any of the analysts brought up TAC.

In general, with Google promoting their own shopping engine more and more, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, NexTag, etc. are going to struggle. This is nothing new as people have been predicting the end of the comparison shopping engines since I started covering the industry. But if traffic for these guys completely crumbles, some of the predictions will come true. Maybe we’ll finally see some consolidation in the industry.