Just in time for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc., consumer electronics shopping engine Retrevo has redesigned and now says it's using artificial intelligence, along the lines of dating sites like eHarmony, to find the perfect "match" between consumers and their would-be electronics purchases. The site seeks to simplify electronics shopping with what it calls the Retrevo "product adviser." The Ajax heavy product adviser groups products into categories it describes as "low end," "mid-range," and "high end," and asks consumers to state brand and feature preferences. Those preferences lead to t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

"Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers. But, for each Monday after Black Friday, consumer searches spike up on the internet and online retail websites enjoy their highest traffic and associated sales of the year. Search engine use is directly impacting businesses during this period, and companies which haven't optimized their internet presence stand to lose out on some of the sales they could be getting if consumers could find them. This is true for online businesses as well as for brick-and-mortar stores. While [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines | Search Marketing: Shopping Search Marketing

Microsoft has announced the acquisition of a comparison shopping engine named Jellyfish.com. Microsoft believes that Jellyfish's technology "has some interesting potential applications" that they can make a "key component" of Live Search. Jellyfish.com takes a bit more of a social approach to comparison shopping by enabling shoppers to sign up and create a profiles. Here is an example of one profile, themadhatter. You can connect with shopping buddies, earn badges, guru points, referrals and much more. Here is a screen capture of this user's profile (you can click on it to view a larger i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Business Issues | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Product search engine Krillion has launched a feature, called "Stock Check," that enables consumers to see if products (starting with TVs) are in stores locally, buy them online and pick them up at a range of major U.S. retail chains, including Sears, Best Buy, Circuit City, and others. Krillion had been using "click to call" to enable consumers to check with the local store or a call center to determine whether products were actually in stores. The new feature, announced today at SMX Local & Mobile, is true real-time inventory information. A number of companies (ShopLocal, StepUp, GPShopper [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Krillion, a shopping engine that directs people to local stores, has launched its second category, televisions. The site went live in February of this year (with appliances), under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Joel Toledano, former Director of Business Development for Yahoo Search. While the Internet continues to rapidly expand its influence over consumer purchase behavior, the overwhelming majority of transactions are made in local stores. Sound like a contradiction? It's not. Two of the most historically bullish proponents of e-commerce, JupiterResearch and Forrester Research, hav [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

According to the Newspaper Association of America, U.S. print newspaper classified advertising was worth about $17 billion in 2006. The category has been under pressure for years from top online verticals, some of which are owned by newspapers, eBay, Craigslist and, now, new aggregators and destinations such as Oodle , LiveDeal and Edgeio, among others. Now eBay has brought its Craigslist-inspired classifieds marketplace, Kijiji, to the U.S. market. The auction site acquired a 25 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004 and launched Kijiji in early 2005 outside the U.S. eBay owns Rent.com in the U [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Classifieds Search Engines | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

The Wall Street Journal (subscription req'd) writes about a partnership between mobile carrier Spint and GPShopper to provide information about local shopping inventory on mobile phones. The consumer application offered by GPShopper is called Slifter, which used to require entry of a Zip code. The partnership with Sprint removes that requirement because of the phone's location awareness. GPShopper is one of several companies seeking to put local store inventory information online (and on mobile devices). Others include ShopLocal, NearbyNow, StepUp, Krillion, Yokel, BrandHabit, Channel Intell [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

A few weeks back, we looked at how the major engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, handled shopping search. This week we look at four of the dedicated shopping search portals: BizRate.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag.com, and a relative newcomer to the space, Become.com. Each of these properties matched up quite well in terms of user experience with the offerings provided by the three major publishers. Generally they were cleaner, with better user interfaces and more information scent for the user. It seems to be one case where the independents are still leading the way, both in [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search & Usability | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior

Judy's Book, which has gone through a very interesting and very public change in its business model – from local directory with reviews to shopping site – has now launched a search engine for deals and coupons: CouponLooker.com. It seeks to be an aggregator of deals online to enable people to find them more quickly and easily. There's also a widget strategy for affiliate distribution. Of course, people love deals and saving money. But you still might be surprised to hear that the total face value of distributed coupons in the U.S. was a whopping $332 billion in 2006 (most of which were ne [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

This week I'll look at shopping search from the user's perspective. We'll be starting with the big three offerings from the major engines, Google's Froogle, Yahoo Shopping and MSN Shopping. In the next Just Behave column I'll be taking a test drive of some of the dedicated shopping search properties and see how they stack up against the offerings from the big three. I'll also look at some of the fundamental interaction principles that we explored in the last two columns, including the consideration set and the area of greatest promise. How do the individual search properties use their to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search & Usability | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Smarter's video product reviews are a very entertaining and useful product research tool. As Smarter's product evangelist Paul Willmes said, "the reviews are by people who actually own [the product] which makes it more real. It makes the opinion more valuable, like a friend giving you advice." The question of 'what to buy' or 'what not to buy' has long been addressed (poorly in my opinion) by the shopping engines through a myriad of buyer's guides, reviews, and user ratings. These resources are sprinkled throughout the shopping engines, but have never been a main focus as the shopping sear [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

The vertical search results on the main shopping engines should not be ignored. We're all very familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but you can also get to the top of Google through Google Base. I estimate that over 30,000 merchants are taking advantage of Google Base, but only a very small percentage have actually done anything to improve their results on Google Base. Over at SingleFeed, I discuss the concept of Data Feed Optimization (DFO) to help submitters get listed higher on Google Base and therefore have the opportunity to show up as a Google OneBox result, above Google's [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Since I've been absent a while (sorry Danny, Chris, and Barry), thought I should first catch everyone up on management changes at the shopping comparison engines. Here's the rundown: Shopzilla: President John Phelps and Chief Product Officer Farhad Mohit have left the company. COO Bill Glass has taken over as president. Here's the press release. Shopping.com: CMO Mike Aufricht, VP Internet Marketing & Business Intelligence Rob Goldman, CTO and Co-Founder Amir Ashkenazi, and Vice President, Global Operations and U.S. Merchant Operations Deana Bergquist have left the company. Here's a look [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: General | Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

I wrote earlier this week about Wize a shopping comparison engine that aggregated millions of reviews to compile a "WizeRank" for each product, based on the total number of positive, neutral or negative reviews found on the web. Today Alex Iskold over on ReadWriteWeb takes a takes a look at Summize, a shopping search engine that also aggregates product reviews from Amazon, but presents product sentiment in a highly visual way using heatmaps. Positive ratings are green, negative are red, with a spectrum of color between them showing how strongly reviewers and consumers feel about a product. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Although most retail commerce still takes place offline in brick and mortar stores, most people use the web to research products before buying. And product reviews, whether from professionals or consumers who've actually bought and used products, can be a big help in making the right decision (or avoiding a wrong one). Product reviews have been staples at online retail sites for years. You can also find them on product comparison engines like Become.com or Yahoo shopping. There are also sites that specialize in aggregating reviews, such as Epinions, ConsumerSearch and ConsumerReview.com. I [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Bob Tedeschi's NY Times e-commerce column today discusses a number of companies, NearbyNow, GPShopper, Krillion, ShopLocal and StepUp seeking to make the online-offline shopping connection. The article's hook is wireless shopping tools from NearbyNow and GPShopper. All these companies, and others, to varying degrees are trying to bring offline inventory information into online databases to meet consumer demand for information about "Where can I buy it today?" Indeed, there are two principal areas of growth for online shopping: social and local/offline. There's ultimately much more demand for [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Brian Smith reports that Windows Live Shopping has been taken offline. The message on the Windows Live Shopping says: This beta test has now ended. Thank you for visiting the Windows Live Shopping beta and helping us test the site. Our vast product selection and user-created content, such as guides and reviews, continues to be available through the MSN Shopping site. You will be redirected to MSN Shopping automatically in 8 seconds. Windows Live Shopping Beta launched on April 28, 2006. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Microsoft: Other Search | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Joining the ranks of a small but growing list of companies trying to connect online product research and offline buying, Krillion launched this morning. Other companies offering local product information to varying degrees in this segment are ShopLocal, StepUp, NearbyNow, Yokel, CNET, Froogle, Become.com and data provider Channel Intelligence. Simply put, Krillion helps consumers find where they can buy products in their markets after conducting online research. It's based on "from the ground up" search/crawling technology and has been in development for a year. The site is starting with wh [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

Marchex and its TrafficLeader subsidiary have published the 2007 Search Marketing Insights for Retailers, a 19 page whitepaper that offers strategies for online merchants to improve search visibility in the major shopping search engines. There's also some interesting data about traffic to each of these services, and a useful table that compares the data feed requirements for each service. The whitepaper is free, but you'll need to provide your name and email address to get to the download page. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines | Search Marketing: Shopping Search Marketing | Stats: Popularity

MySupermarket is one of those sites that you sometimes look at and immediately think 'I'll be coming back here on a regular basis'. The concept is very simple - you choose one of 4 UK supermarkets from Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Ocado and you shop for your groceries. All the groceries are shown in illustrated form on the page as well as being described, together with any discounts or special offers the supermarket has on offer. At the top of the screen the system keeps a tally of how much you have spent and provides a comparison with the prices from the three other supermarkets. When you h [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines