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February 03, 2005Price-Comparison Research: Online Retail Price Range is IncreasingThe New York Times has an article, Price-Comparison Sites Do the Legwork (free registration required), that details a reporter's experiences with price-comparison shopping, but the real meat of the article is the reference to Michael R. Baye, a business professor at Indiana University (plus collegues John Morgan of Berkley and Patrick Scholten of Bentley). Professor Baye studied 20 million(!) online price quotes on ~10,000 consumer-electronic products from various price-comparison sites. He says that over the last five years, the gap between the lowest prices and the highest prices has actually increased from 35% to 45%. You can find more information (and cool interactive charts) at Nash-Equilibrium.com.
Price-Comparison Research: Online Retail Price Range is Increasing re: Slow WeekPosting might be a little sporadic for the next week or so while I help take care of our injured beagle. She gets out of the doggie hospital tonight, and I'm here to tell you that beagle-proofing a home is not easy!
re: Slow Week January 31, 2005Is Become.com starting to sound like......the dynamic realization of Organized Shopping? I have added "or Become.com" to my mini-manifesto on the home page, just in case. ;-)
Is Become.com starting to sound like... January 27, 2005A9 Introduces the Visual Yellow PagesWow! A9's "block view" is trying to change the way we interact with the Yellow Pages. Try it: "starbucks seattle" brings up listings like this one for Starbucks. A decade ago, who would have thought we would be able to have so much interaction with the yellow pages? Will usage of the paper yellow pages become one of the markers of old age, like ten-cent movies and walking uphill in the snow -- both ways -- were for our grandparents? I'm already liking several of the features. Each listing comes with a large default photo, and several smaller photos taken at different angles. You do not even need to click the thumbnails to enlarge them, the change is made in real-time simply by hovering your mouse over them. Also, there is a check box under each thumbnail that allows visitors to vote on the best image of the business. Also, if you know me, you know I kinda have a thing for structured information. So does Amazon.com, as we can see by clicking on a "Update Business Info" link, which leads to a form that includes the following structured fields: Continue reading "A9 Introduces the Visual Yellow Pages"
A9 Introduces the Visual Yellow Pages January 26, 2005Comparison Shopping On The Cover Of Catalog Age...and the article includes a summary grid of facts & figures of interest to merchant advertisers. And so it continues, as individual catalogs find their way into the big virtual catalog(s).
Comparison Shopping On The Cover Of Catalog Age January 25, 2005Is comparison shopping bad for Amazon.com?That is the question being asked by the Internet Stock Blog. Answer: yes, but not necessarily for the reason mentioned in this post. I could be wrong, but my feeling is that many (most?) of the people who are super-concerned with price differences have already found a favorite price comparison engine or two. Similar to the fear among advertisers that sooner or later everyone would get ad-blocking software. It could happen, but only if it came enabled by default on new computers (i.e. Norton). Growth rates cannot be extrapolated from the early adopters, if the rest of the market might not know enough or care enough to go down the same path. The mass market will need more hand-holding. For price comparison, this could happen if Froogle and Yahoo! Shopping get increased exposure on their parent search engines. Okay, now let's talk about the real threat. Continue reading "Is comparison shopping bad for Amazon.com?"
Is comparison shopping bad for Amazon.com? First, Shopping IPO. Next, Vendor VC.BusinessWeek has a write-up on VC-backed shopping solutions provider Mercent. It sounds like they work with a range of shopping comparison sites, but their bread 'n' butter is Amazon.com. "When retailers set up Amazon storefronts, transactions are processed on Amazon.com, which then need to be reconciled with the retailer's inventory and shipping. Mercent is one of five Amazon-sanctioned vendors to do that basic work, along with consulting projects on how to increase Amazon store sales." ...and the only one to bid on "Amazon.com integration" at Google, FWIW.
First, Shopping IPO. Next, Vendor VC. January 24, 2005Update to the Hotel Comparison: NexTagSeveral fine folks at NexTag informed me that they are not exactly chopped liver when it comes to travel search. Indeed, although it is probably too late for an "apples vs. apples" pricing comparison, an initial search of hotels at NexTag returned 22 of the 30 targetted Las Vegas hotels, and I did even better -- 28 hotels -- in a subsequent search. (Apparently, Vegas.com was not included as a source in the initial search). Score one for the all-around shopping engines. I'll be sure to include NexTag in the upcoming airfare shootout. One neat thing about NexTag is how they cluster results while maintaining transparency. In other words, they only show one listing per hotel on the main search results page, which keeps things uncluttered. Yet, they display prices from several providers at the bottom of each listing, if applicable, and a one-off page displays details from all providers. Compare that to other travel search engines such as Mobissimo, which does not cluster, and SideStep, which uses "blind" re-directs, and NexTag might be on to something here, at least in terms of price comparison.
Update to the Hotel Comparison: NexTag Pre-Launch Q&A; with Michael Yang of Become.comJason Dowdell has the scoop on Become.com in the form of a Q&A; session with CEO Michael Yang. Become.com will be interesting because it promises to be more like a "classic" search engine than a shopping comparison site. I'll be doing an in-depth comparison of Become.com and its most-related competitors (to be determined) after next month's launch. added: a clarification of Become Crawler Info For Webmasters
Pre-Launch Q&A; with Michael Yang of Become.com |
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Sean