Microsoft betters offer of Quadrangle to buy Ciao

Microsoft has agreed to buy Greenfield Online, owner of European price comparison website ciao.com, for about $486 million to boost its Internet search and e-commerce business in Europe. Microsoft, whose $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo earlier this year failed after a protracted battle, said on Friday the acquisition should benefit its Live Search platform. Microsoft also bought Jellyfish some time ago, which they integrated into their Product Search. This is the second sign that Microsoft is really acting on what their were saying a year ago (read my post on that).

Microsoft’s vice president for Windows and online services, Tami Reller about Ciao:

The team at Ciao has built a passionate consumer community based on intuitive technology and extensive merchant relationships that we believe will deliver incremental benefit to the Microsoft Live Search platform.

Ciao.com offers advice on purchases, mainly of consumer electronics, and encourages users to join a network of shopping experts to share opinions. It makes its revenues from e-commerce, merchant referrals and advertising sales.

Microsoft’s offer of $17.50 per share betters an earlier proposal by media-focused U.S. buyout firm Quadrangle Group (read my former post on this) to acquire the company for $15.50 a share, and represents a slight premium to Greenfield’s closing price of $17.25 on Thursday. On August 26, Greenfield had said it had received a $17.50 per share offer but did not reveal from whom. The latest offer represents a premium of about 10 percent over Greenfield’s closing share price on August 25.

Microsoft said it had agreed to sell off Greenfield Online’s main business, which surveys consumer opinion online and sells the results to market researchers, to an unnamed financial buyer. The companies expect both deals to close during the fourth quarter of 2008. Completion of the Greenfield sale to Microsoft does not depend on Microsoft’s disposal of the online survey business, the two companies said.

New release Google Product Search

Yesterday I mentioned that Microsoft had made some changes in their Live product search. It now seems that Google is also testing a new version of its Product Search with actual CSE features. This includes the aggregation of merchant offers by product, compare functionalities, technical specifications of products and reviews for products. This new version was first seen in December ‘07 by eCommerceOptimization. The changes are only visible on Google.com. On local sites of Google in Europe nothing has changed (yet).

It will be likely that Google will start promoting this service in their regular search results. Currently they still use the ‘shopping bag’ icon, but according to SearchEngineland Google is also testing with displaying the product image.

Pangora launches its own comparison engine

An interesting move from Pangora. They have decided to not only provide portals (and anyone willing to open a comparison engine) with a white-label solution, but also to enter the CSE market itself. Pangora is a subsidiary of Lycos. Some time ago Pangora (or actually Lycos) bought Mentasys, as Mentasys was the front-runner in mapping and matching of product content.

The fact that Pangora has decided to enter the CSE market is not really a surprise, as they had a business model that is not really sustainable in the long run. I will try to picture this below:

If you want to open a new comparison engine, you just go to Pangora. They basically can provide you with anything you need, so:
- deals with shops
- portal/comparison software (so, the website)
- mapping and matching of datafeeds to product data
- product data

The mayor drawback is that you will have to pay a 30% (or close to that number) commission to Pangora. This is probably ok if you’re just starting, but when you have gained in visitors and income you probably want your own solution. It’s just like doing match; when is it more profitable to do all this yourself? Besides, if your service is gaining in popularity, you want to stand out from the crowd, the Pangora solution is a me-too solution.

As things at Lycos and Pangora aren’t really flourishing this could be their last attempt. Moving from Munich to Karlsruhe also did not really help attaining the best people (this has been rumored, so it has not been checked by me).

Anyhow, their new site Decido is quite impressing. The usability is good and the services they provide are also quite well integrated. Now let’s see if they can also attract the visitors. They have some experience with that at Lycos, but for Pangora this must be new. As the SEO and SEM market in Germany are quite overheated (and weird in my humble opinion) I am curious if they can make it fly. A good site and content is one thing, having (happy and returning) visitors is the must crucial element for success!

Top 10 CSE tips for e-tailers during the holiday season

Below 10 tips for webshops are shown on how to use comparison engines during the holiday season. These tips were just published by ChannelAdvisor:

1. Get moving
Let’s face it – we are already in the make-or-break fourth quarter and the holidays are right around the corner. Take time now to review what products sold the best last holiday season, what products are currently selling well, and anticipate what will be hot for the holidays this year.

2. Target the big CSE’s, but don’t forget the others
There are many great comparison shopping engines (CSEs) out there, but focusing on the big ones is a sure way to get your products in front of the most consumers. The big CSEs (top 5) account normally for more than 70-75 percent of all comparison shopping traffic.

Supermarkets the new threat for e-tailers and CSE’s?

Papers in the UK yesterday were full of talk about plans by Tesco to grow its online empire and cause even larger headaches for online retailers in the UK. Both the Observer and Mail on Sunday reported that the supermarket giant is set to announce its long-anticipated move into the online clothing sector…

The Sunday Times, meanwhile, says the company is expected to announce impressive growth figures for its non-food site Tesco Direct when it reveals its interim results, as well as planning to roll out more internet kiosks in its Homeplus outlets (thus fully utilizing their advantage with clicks and bricks).

Also, Tesco is to move into the online price comparison market (!), with the launch of a website offering a range of finance products and services. Tescocompare.com is a joint venture between Tesco and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The site is currently live and offers financial services from RBS companies like Churchill, but also from other providers.

Tesco will be joining a busy market, with the likes of moneysupermarket.com, which was valued at £1bn for its recent IPO, and Admiral’s confused.com already well established. Price comparison sites have been criticised recently for perceived bias in their listings, so it will be interesting to see if Tesco favours the financial services offered by its partner in the venture. My guess is they probably will…

It would be interesting to see if other supermarket giants like Carrefour and Aldi (besides many others) in Europe will follow this trend. Basically they have access to customer data, the customers and to money…

Source: http://www.e-consultancy.com