Amazon is turning into a shopping search engine

 

 

Amazon is making a move in the direction of becoming a shopping search engine. This week, it launched a program called Product Ads, which lets any Web merchant buy cost-per-click ads on Amazon linked to specific product searches.

No announcement was made other than a blast e-mail to product marketers and the addition of a paragraph at the bottom of this page describing how you can advertise with Amazon.

Although it is a limited test for now (in the Electronics & Computers, Home & Garden, Tools, and Toys, Kids & Baby categories), Product Ads is a direct response to the encroachment of Google and product search engines like eBay’s Shopping.com.

More people probably start their online shopping at Google than at Amazon.com these days. With Product Ads, Amazon is fighting back. Anyone who searches for a product on Amazon today will find either products that Amazon sells or ones that its merchant affiliates sell. Now Amazon is saying that any Websites that is selling something related to its product categories can buy an ad that will show up as a highly targeted product search result, along with all the items on Amazon and its merchant sites.

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Ideeli raises $3.8 million for luxury shopping network

 

 

Ideeli, the closed shopping network where consumers can buy luxury brands at discounted prices, has just secured $3.8 million in Series A funding, led by Kodiak Ventures and angel investors. 

Ideeli is a members-only shopping community that offers women's luxury bags, sunglasses, jewelry, accessories, fragrances and more for 50 to 90% off original prices from top luxury and fashion brands, plus giveaways every week.

All the items are only available for a limited time, and they have a limited quantity of each, so it pays to move quickly if you see something you like. All sales are final - no returns. 

When you become a member, you can choose to be notified when we post items for sale (or are accepting entries for giveaways) via email (2nd Row member - free) or on your cell phone via text message (1st Row membership - $7.99 per month). 1st Row members can also shop an hour early for all our sales and enter all the giveaways from their cell phones.

Ideeli is a great concept and likely to gain traction. Ideeli has an interesting business model in that it plans to make money from text messages rather than just concentrating on the revenue from the product sales.

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THE FROSTFIRE BUZZ TEST

1. Is this a unique product? 8/10

2. Is this business/product difficult to replicate? 7/10

3. Is this something that can appeal to a large global audience? 7/10

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Comparison shopping traffic increases 56 percent

 

 

Hitwise reports that comparison shopping websites saw an increase in the online market share of visits last week compared to the same week in 2006.

Online traffic to a custom category of leading comparison shopping websites increased 56 percent last week compared to the smae period last year.

Yahoo! Shopping received the highest market share of visits within the category at 20 percent, with their market share increasing 44 percent from the same week last year. Smarter.com and Bizrate followed with 15 and 14 percent, respectively.

• The retailers benefiting the most from the top comparison shopping websites were Amazon, eBay, Target, Overstock.com, Wal-Mart, and JCPenney in the percentage of downstream traffic from those same sites for the week ending Nov. 3, 2007.


• Search engines were the main driver of traffic to the top comparison shopping websites with Google referring 20 percent of visits and Yahoo! Search referring 14 percent for the week ending Nov. 3, 2007.


• The leading product search terms driving traffic to the comparison shopping websites were laptop computers, Nintendo Wii, LCD TV, digital cameras, iPods, and Xbox360 for the four weeks ending Nov. 3, 2007.

Baby boomers are the main visitors of comparison shopping websites and consumer electronics continue to be popular amongst these comparison shoppers.

The share of traffic from online users aged 45+ increased 38 percent across the top comparison shopping sites. Shopzilla experienced the biggest increase in traffic among visitors aged 45+ with a 58 percent gain. NexTag saw a 48 percent increase in traffic while Yahoo! Shopping received a 46 percent increase for the same week.

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Crowdstorm continues to stumble

 

 

Crowdstorm, the UK product reviews site that launched last year, but has since been effectively closed for a refurb and just launched its invite-only testing phase for its latest version.

Crowdstorm is designed to help you make better informed purchase decisions based on the crowd's advice and recomendations.

In theory Crowdstorm would like each product to have a team of experts to answer your product questions, an open discussion forum, a list of most popular product, as well as professional reviews with videos and photos. Nice idea, but hard to execute. 

The problem with the first version of Crowdstorm was the lack of traction, the site will need millions of unique users per month to build up the content on Crowdstorm.  Like many user submitted content sites, without the users, the site falls flat.

There has been a great deal of crowd wisdom review sites launch over the last few months and the competition has been compounded by other sites like Nsyght and Twine  that are taking a “social-first” approach to gaining knowledge about products and other areas of interest.

Crowdstorm has been stumbling for too long, they need to rapidly launch and get traction before the competition storm ahead.

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THE FROSTFIRE BUZZ TEST

1. Is this a unique product? 6/10

2. Is this business/product difficult to replicate? 7/10

3. Is this something that can appeal to a large global audience? 8/10

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