Shopper.com Sharpens Comparative Content with CNET Channel DataSource™

Distinguished by a legacy of credibility thanks to its association with one of the Web's premier sources for news and reviews, CNET Shopper.com ("Shopper.com") is an online shopping supersite combining powerful comparison-shopping technology, news and reviews for some 400,000 hardware and software products for consumer and business users. What most visitors take for granted is the site's difference as one of the few Web stores to pair expert reviews with extensive product specification and performance details on par with data provided by the manufacturer.

As a result, users find much more than a tool for best-price shopping. Deals from certified, trusted merchants are cross-linked to product reviews, user opinions, and news briefs from sister company CNET News.com.

Encyclopedic information becomes intuitive to locate, easy to use

Along with a powerful price comparison engine, Shopper.com incorporates extensive product data and editorial analysis from the content providers that are part of parent CNET's network of companies. While other Web sites pair product content with price comparison capabilities, Shopper.com has distanced itself from the pack through a navigation infrastructure provided by CNET Channel's DataSource™ that brings cohesion and order to a vast range of content.

"Prior to DataSource, the entire Shopper.com catalog was managed entirely by hand," says Dan Baran, director of the team in Shopper.com's catalog development department. "When we first launched as Computers.com, we had a lot of staff in our San Francisco office who would mine the manufacturers' Web sites manually, entering all kinds of product specifications and configurations to collect the data to enter into our catalog." As a result of the labor-intensive searching, staff became domain experts for a particular type of technology. These employees would map product data to resellers' stock-keeping unit (SKU) information, to produce a merchant list page within each price comparison page.

The site was transformed in 2001, when Shopper.com chose DataSource as its data acquisition and organization platform for product details. Factors in Shopper.com's decision to partner with ChannelOnline (prior to its acquisition by CNET) included the quality and normalization of data in the DataSource solution, which exceeded what was possible through manual effort. Baran reports that these characteristics proved satisfactory at the time of selection and continued to improve. As a result, the partnership allowed Shopper.com staff to focus on their core competency and hone a significant point of differentiation: the editorial perspective they bring to the comparison and catalog aspects of the Web site.

"Essentially, we were assured a superior data collection and aggregation system was at work mining product information to the level of detail and scope that we needed," says Baran. "Obviously, this was a far more cost-effective and viable approach to scaling up content than ceaseless hiring-which had been the secret to our success." Shopper.com receives DataSource information as well as data for additional product SKUs it requests from CNET Channel, which acquires the content from the manufacturer and other trustworthy sources.

Shopper.com performs data transformation on the flat text file to modify it to the company's own data model, and then performs data integrity verification prior to publishing the information to the Web site. DataSource also provides the organizational framework for presenting this information.

"We drive the site's navigation infrastructure off of DataSource. A product doesn't get categorized until our publishing system reads its attributes and identifies where the information should flow into the Web site," Baran explains.

Shopper.com maintains a complex system of categorization trees that are mapped to each other, so that products can be classified in more than one category. This system underpins the simple yet powerful navigation "pick lists" on the Web site-the drop-down menus that site visitors use to specify aspects of a notebook PC, such as RAM, hard drive size, operating system and more, to narrow the product search.

Partnership powers consumer value

Shopper.com's partnership with CNET Channel and its use of DataSource have served as a springboard for innovation that further distinguishes the online store from its rivals. Value-based comparison is one such feature, made possible through artificial intelligence applied to the DataSource content. For each attribute of a given product, the value based function generates a monetary value with respect to other products in the same class. These value determinations are incorporated daily into content for the Shopper.com catalog's hundreds of thousands of products and bring yet another useful dimension to consumers' decision-making resources.

Baran points out that his lean catalog team is more efficient and effective, spending time on specialized rather than commodity tasks, thanks to DataSource. "Data mining was my staff's sole job. Now it's a fraction of their responsibility-the only manual data entry they may do relates to products we review that are not yet available."

Baran continues, "My team spends its time thinking about how to make the navigation infrastructure better on the site, how to develop features such as product briefs, and how to bring our expertise to bear on new categories of products that don't fit standard classification. We call them 'Technical Consumer Goods,' things like GPS and high-tech kitchen appliances.

Shopper.com outpaces future competition

As CNET Channel continues to enhance its DataSource solution, Baran anticipates that requests for specific additional product information will meet with even faster response times and continually improving data quality. Shopper.com will exploit these refinements and the sophisticated navigation made possible by DataSource, to create a stand-out shopping experience preferred by discerning shoppers.

One result of navigation advances may be simpler but more targeted shopping. A recent initiative of Baran's combines similar products that differ in only one or two specifications, so that the aggregate set of features becomes a navigation element.

DataSource data quality will make it possible to offer navigation by families, such as accessories, lines, software versions, and product generations. "If you're looking for a printer, all of the other products in the line, and all of the other past versions should be there so you can even look for the version you have and find all the accessories for it," says Baran.

About CNET Shopper.com

CNET Shopper.com is a leading online comparison shopping Web site for consumer and business technology. Spanning more than 400,000 products, Shopper.com offers a peerless collection of product data, news and reviews for users to browse and make informed purchase decisions based on more than best price.