Google becoming Big Brother in e-commerce?

It all started out as a very good search engine (developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin) with a new concept, namely ranking search results based on pageranking. Considering Larry and Sergey studied at Stanford University, this was quite a simple but effective idea. In the academic world, people who are quoted or named in published articles are expected to be important in their area of work. So Larry and Sergey argued this would probably also be the case for a website with a lot of hyperlinks linking to that site.

Since the launch of their succesful search engine Google is slowly growing into a new Microsoft. Slowly but gradually they are moving away from their core business, i.e. “search”.

Optimize your datafeed – Part 2

On July 23, 2007 I explained how small changes in your datafeed can make all the difference. Now I would like to explain why it is important to include as much information as possible in these feeds.

Currently, almost all shopping comparison engines require datafeeds. In the beginning shopping comparison sites ‘ crawled’ the sites of merchants, but this turned out to be a tedious way to obtain prices and product information. The advantage of using data feeds is that all the information is provided in a predefined format which is easy for the shopping engine to understand and analyze. It’s much easier, faster and more reliable for the shopping engine to get its information from a data feed than by trying to crawl a merchant website.

Jaw-dropping demo of Photosynth – Microsoft’s new hit?

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo.

Dutch online shoppers biggest bargain hunters

A study by EIAA indicates that 54% of Dutch online shoppers regularly use a comparison shopping engine. In Germany people tend to visit auction sites more often than anywhere else; 62% of the Germans visited an auction site at least once a month.

Will Push-to-Talk replace SMS?

UK-based Palringo (funded by Prime Technology Ventures) has pioneered the concept of Vocal Instant Messaging as the basis for a communications service that allows individuals, communities and businesses to communicate instantly and effectively at low costs across mobile phones and PCs.

Optimize your datafeeds

Shops that start working with comparison shopping engines often forget one big thing, which is their datafeed… Optimizing your datafeed will help with a lot of things:

- more matched products
- more quality leads
- better conversion
- less money spent

How to choose the right Shopping Comparison Engine

If you have an online shop, the one thing that is most important is to attract shoppers. Well, were to go? You can use affiliate programs (like Tradedoubler or Affiliates), you can use Google Adwords and obviously also comparison shopping engines. Even if I focus on the Netherlands, there are already quite a lot of such engines. As a shop it might be difficult to decide which one to choose. As I work for the Compare Group, which exploits several of these engines, I would have to suggest to test. Here is what to look for:

Affordable video advertising, will it work?

A few months ago I heard from my former employer that they were working on a new and interesting concept which had something to do with video’s. Then the manager of Kelkoo.nl (one of our current competitors) resigned and ended up working for this new start-up company. What a small world we live in, especially in The Netherlands

Comparing carrental fares… pfff, that sucks

As I will be going on a holiday soon, I started off comparing the fares of carrentals. Obviously this quest began at our own site, Vergelijk.nl, however it did not give satisfying results (yeah, I am honest enough to say that). Let’s just begin with what we need:

1. a normal sized car with best value for money (I am Dutch )
2. four doors and a sizeable trunk (I have a baby, so that gives a lot of extra stuff and I need four doors because I have to strap my little one in its car seat)
3. we need it for two weeks
4. did I mention I need a car seat for the baby?
5. oh, and I do not want to pay for extra insurance locally, so I want to pay it all now
6. we are going to Malaga in Spain

Well, let the search begin!

Keeping the price the same, everywhere (baby stuff)

As I work for a comparison shopping engine I pay attention to price differences whenever I can. So, when a little baby was born I immediately went to our site and compared baby stuff (stollers, car seats, cribbs, baby carriers, you name it). But to my surpise, there was no price difference. All the (European) manufacturers seem to have closed a deal that they do not allow price differences, both on- as offline.

I also talked to some online shops and they admit this. They are kindly asked (in other words forced) to maintain the high asking price. If you’ve had a baby, you would know that everything is extremely expensive, but hey it’s your kid. So you do not want to make a big problem out of it.

However, I gave this story to a journalist who made it a great story!

Article in AD: Babyproducten zijn overal even duur