ComparisonEngines

Ok, it’s one thing to turn away existing merchants (to be fair, we were warned), but what kind of experience are you giving prospective merchants when you show them a message (the same one as above) that you’re going to be down for 6 days? At the very least, first thing tomorrow morning, Shopping.com should replace that message with a simple form so they can collect the email address, company name, contact name, etc. for prospective advertisers. This is not too difficult, right? Am I missing something? Once the Merchant Center is back up, the company can then easily email prospective merchants.

Just a suggestion…

UPDATE2: I got a second call from SDC (a couple hours after the first) saying that they would take my listings down so I wouldn’t get charged. The company is hosting 2 webcasts this coming week to introduce the new Merchant Account Center. This is the first major upgrade in 3 years. I got a preview back in April at the SDC Merchant Summit. I’ll let you know about the improvements.

UPDATE: Well, I got a call from SDC saying that while they can’t take my listings down, they will credit me for any clicks that take place over the next 5 days. I have a feeling they will have to do this for a number of merchants.

First it was Yahoo!, then it was Commission Junction, now it’s Shopping.com. I just tried to login to my Shopping.com account and found out that the Merchant Account Center is going to be down from September 16th – September 21st. Yes, I could have paid more attention to the email notification I received from Shopping.com on September 12th (I just went back to read it), but I truthfully think that 1 email entitled ‘Merchant Account Center Upgrade Notification’ is not good enough. At the very least, the title should have been ‘Alert: Merchant Account Center Down 9/16 – 9/22, Make Changes NOW’.

According to the current notification on the site, no changes can be made to my account over the next 6 days which means that merchants are going to get charged for clicks they might not want. This is poor customer service, and I expect to be credited for any clicks over the next 6 days. I was logging into the account to suspend my listings as the recent increase in PPC prices (after the summer ‘sale’) and a very low conversion rate are making Shopping.com a poor marketing channel for PersonalProtectionStore (one of my accounts) right now. To be clear, I’m not saying that I’ll stop using Shopping.com, I just need to re-optimize my feed.

I’m sure the upgrade will provide positive functionality improvements (maybe someone at Shopping.com wants to fill me in), but not allowing me to access my account for 6 days is absurd.

Shopping.com continues to make progress on its Hotel category. Users can now compare prices for most hotels, although there are a ton of bugs in the system. I’m really surprised that Shopping.com continues to develop the site publicly without at least stating that the category is in BETA. The company will not yet release any information about its plans (I tried talking with them when I was in SF last week), but I’m sure announcements are coming soon.

Shopping.com seems to have partnered with online travel agencies (OTAs) and reservation networks such as Travelocity and World Choice Travel (Sabre), Lodging.com (Cendant), WorldRes (WRI), and Hotels.com (IAC).

More interestingly, though, Shopping.com also seems to be working with some hotel brands. In this search for the Marriott San Jose (just advance the dates if the results say no rooms available), ‘Shopping.com Hotels’ is listed as a provider. This could mean that Shopping.com is building relationships with hotel brands and will lead shoppers directly to the brand as opposed to an OTA. Brands like this approach because working directly with the customer increases brand loyalty and cuts distribution costs in the long run.

One last note…it looks like Shopping.com is accessing hotel availability information in real-time as opposed to the once per day feed approach the company employs with it’s general merchants.

Again, everything I’ve said is speculation because the company is not commenting. Check out the site for yourself…but be prepared for some interesting bugs.

Enjoy your 4th of July!

As reported back in May, Shopping.com plans to tightly integrate its Epinions reveiws into its new hotel vertical and bring “it’s proprietary assets – structure, organization, and productization” to the hotel category. While the vertical is not yet complete, we can now get a better sense of how the end product might look.

As with the productization Shopping.com has done with its other verticals, users can narrow down choices by features such as Hotel Amenities, Recommended Travel Type, and Room Amenities. This is an improvement over the current categorization on Epinions which only allows users to choose hotels by ‘Chain’ or ‘Recommended Travel Type.’ While Shopping.com has done an impressive job allowing the user to sort by important room amenities such as Sprinklers in Rooms and Toilet (interesting to note that only 169 out of 50,000+ hotels feature toilets!), it’s a little annoying having to choose one amenity after another versus being able to choose multiple amenities at once (Become.com’s new price comparison engine will feature this type of system and SideStep currently offers a similar check-box system).

After narrowing down choices, users can sort hotels by rating or price. Ratings seem to be taken directly from Epinions.com reviews. While Shopping.com encourages users to write reviews (at the moment, most hotels only have a couple reviews), users are taken to an Epinions page where they eventually have to register to submit the reveiw. The Epinions page looks completely different than the Shopping.com page, so there is a bit of a branding issue.

At the moment, there are no prices listed for any of the hotels, but hidden at the bottom of each hotel review page, there is a link to compare prices. Once clicked, you see a message which reads “Sorry, there are no offers available from any of our stores at this time.”

I’ll be in the SF starting tomorrow for eBay Live! and Vertical Leap, so I’ll try to meet with someone at Shopping.com for more information.

The behind the scenes story of the eBay/Shopping.com deal. This is taken directly from the proxy statement dated June 21st. (See all Shopping.com SEC Filings):

Background to the Merger

Following Shopping.com’s initial public offering in October 2004, Shopping.com focused on developing its online comparison shopping business on a stand-alone basis. During the spring of 2005, Shopping.com’s board of directors and management became increasingly concerned with the competitive threat posed by larger companies such as Google, Inc. and Yahoo! and the possible addition of comparison shopping capabilities by online retailers such as eBay and Amazon.com, and the effect of increasing consolidation on smaller, more focused comparison shopping companies.

On April 26, 2005, Rajiv Dutta, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of eBay, spoke with William Gurley, a director of Shopping.com, and suggested a meeting to discuss a potential strategic transaction between eBay and Shopping.com. On April 28, 2005, William Barmeier, Vice President, Corporate Development of eBay, contacted Ms. Norrington, and on April 29 and May 2, 2005, Ms. Norrington and Mr. Barmeier held telephonic discussions during which Mr. Barmeier also suggested a potential transaction. Ms. Norrington reported these overtures to Shopping.com’s management and, on May 4, 2005, to our board of directors, and our board of directors authorized our management to proceed with a meeting with eBay. On May 5, 2005, Ms. Norrington, Greg Santora, our chief financial officer, and Ignacio J. Fanlo, our chief technology officer, met with Mr. Dutta, Mr. Barmeier and other eBay representatives to discuss the potential benefits of a strategic transaction and to provide a general overview of Shopping.com’s business.

On several occasions between May 5 and May 11, 2005, Ms. Norrington and Mr. Gurley had discussions with Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, I started to review the Shopping.com Schedule 14A proxy statement (see all Shopping.com SEC filings). Lorrie Norrington, the new President & CEO of Shopping.com must be pretty content with the proposed deal. Shareholders are being asked to approve “the granting of a bonus payment of US$1 million to Lorrie Norrington immediately prior to the consummation of the merger.”

The bonus is said to cover excise taxes as a result of the merger and to put her in the same “after-tax position as she would have been in if the excise taxes described above were not imposed.”

Lorrie’s base salary will be $350,000. As of June 7, Lorrie held options to purchase 630,000 Shopping.com ordinary shares.

Shopping.com (NASDAQ: SHOP) is up 5% intraday on a Deutsche Bank upgrade (to hold from sell). The stock is now back where it was prior to its earnings announcement on April 27, and up 20% from a low of $12.90 on April 29.

I’m trying to get my hands on the Deutsche Bank research, but the wires report that “the current multiples reflect the market’s concerns regarding traffic, growth prospects, reinvestment versus margin expansion and competition. The broker told clients that operating margin expansion may be limited in the near term as the company invests in international expansion. ” The broker went on to say that Deutsche Bank thinks brand advertising in the US might be a better investment than international expansion.

I spoke with Dan Ciporin by phone on May 9th. I met Dan quickly at the first Shopping.com merchant summit which the company hosted near its headquarters in Brisbane, CA April 20-21. As I was at the event as a merchant*, I will not report on the content of the merchant summit, but I will say that I was impressed with the quality of the Shopping.com team. Here’s what Dan had to say.

My comments are indented.

On click fraud: “Click fraud is definitely an issue with PPC search engines, and there is a lot of it out there. However, we got a jump on it years ago. At this point, we have lots of mechanisms in place to catch it, and we’ve implemented measuring tools that we think are accurate. If anything, we may over-filter.” Read the rest of this entry »

Shopping.com (NASDAQ: SHOP) is up 8% today on nearly double its average daily volume. The only news out of the company is a SEC filing announcing that the CTO sold 904 shares of stock, leaving his holdings at 526,457 shares.

In general, it’s been a strong day for internet stocks.

SHOP dropped after releasing earnings late last month, at which time many analysts were concerned about rising online marketing costs. Since then, however, the company launched its mortgate comparison section, presented at the Piper Jaffray 7th Annual Technology Conference (click on the link to listen to the webcast), and had an interview with TheStreet.com touting its international expansion. Other positive notes of interest include: 1) total cash per share sitting near $5 and 2) the upcoming launch of its hotel comparison section.