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Wolves at the Door: Five Companies That Will Determine the Future of Comparison Shopping
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David Rodnitzky (37 Posts)
David Rodnitzky is founder and CEO of PPC Associates, a Google AdWords Certified Company. PPC Associates helps clients drive ROI from AdWords and Facebook PPC with a unique combination of big agency expertise and small agency service. Contact David at david@ppcassociates.com to get a free quote on how he can help improve your SEM.
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I only take issue with saying that Google is a direct competitor to eBay’s Skype; the comparison cited is misleading. Yes, Skype charges for some services, but it charges for a service that GTalk doesn’t offer. In particular, with Skype, you get a phone number that you can call from a regular phone and you can call regular phones from Skype. GTalk only offers PC to PC calls, which is part of Skype’s free service. That is what you pay for. (And also, they really do mean PC, as in a Windows PC, not a “personal computer” like a Macintosh.)
Hi – wondering if there is any sort of “site map standard” for the algo-powered CSE’s like TheFind.com – kind of like the standardized G/Y/M site maps – to help these sites find/crawl ecom sites. Thanks!
Erica, I took your question straight to the source – Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind. Here’s his response:
“In general following well established SEO friendly guideless for the major search engines works equally well for TheFind. This means that the site should have a site map and a standardized URL structure.
Making the shopping site work well for all the consumers also helps all of the Web crawlers. This means that if new UI features that use Javascript/AJAX or Flash are used, the same information should also be available on the Web page via HTML.
Merchants should feel free to check out their products on TheFind and we would encourage them to contact us using “talk TheFind.com” with any suggestions, comments, or questions.”
Hope that answers your question! -David
And here’s some additional information from TheFind’s VP of Marketing:
“In crawling 100,000s of shopping Web sites, we have seen how good customer-design results in a good presence on TheFind.com’s search engine. The biggest benefit for any ecommerce site is to have the search engine see exactly what the customer sees, and to have that data clearly presented and articulated with good titles, descriptions, and pricing. Good usability and SEO standards include not showing data purely using Javascript/AJAX or Flash but also having the data be visible via HTML together with utilizing standardized product URLs and site maps.
Structured product data is always beneficial, but the many large e-commerce categories such as apparel, home and garden, sports and outdoor, health and beauty are lack structured data (i.e. manufacturer part numbers, UPC codes). That is where a smart search engine like TheFind does a lot of the heavy lifting to classify and categorize these products and stores together in meaningful ways for the consumers searching for them. The simple rule for e-commerce Web site design is to have your data appear clear, complete, accurate and in a consistent format across the site to the consumer, and this will immediately also benefit search engines crawling your site.”
You said “and while this alone wouldn’t kill the CSEs, it would certainly be a fatal blow. ”
what are the other options as both of the above appear terminal
I have shopped online frequently for 9+ years. Except for googling a chosen item for purveyors, I have never used any of these sites. On occasion I have been re-directed unwittingly to one of the original 5, but always found the result outdated or useless. I don’t foresee using any of these sites mentioned here, save Google, in the future. I think the new wave for shopping is becoming and will be boutique sites that figure out how to deliver focused or specialized non-digital products quickly and at low (below street user) or no shipping cost.
Streamlined, organized and budget conscious businesses can always rise to the top. Service and something extra (info, user or host recommendations, support, etc.) while not being over-priced is the key. If the lowest price is all you have to offer, you are already out of business–you are in the pre-collapse stage and awaiting epiphany.
The mega portals only interest Internet newbies. Experienced users are operating at other echelons. Soon the vast majority of users with be more adept at surfing than writing their names and grocery lists. The sites you portend as the future will have/do have little to offer seasoned digital users with online experience that matches the site builders themselves.
Google is the catalog, the index and appendix remain undefined. However, I am sure the Googleans are thinking about monetizing those undeveloped areas as you read.
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