Both Pricegrabber and Retrevo have given their sites facelifts and in the case of Retrevo, released some new features. Exerpted from an email from CEO Vipin Jain, they have ‘introduced value-based shopping along with visual simplicity … to make shopping fun again’. check it out at http://retrevo.com

Amazon will be offering hourly deals/specials and all sorts of other Black Friday wonderfulness without the actual long lines, parking problems and traffic jams (and crazy people shouting “Planet of the Apes on DVD for $19.99 one per customer, omg kids, each grab one!”): here’s the page with their deals.

I really like startup blogs that are smart and informative: like that of Jellyfish.com, the comparison shopping/advertising company which was acquired by Microsoft in October. Congratulations to the Jellyfish team; they were doing some interesting stuff and hopefully they can continue to do so under MSFT’s roof.

Referenced in a post from the excellent Comparison Engines site (Brian Smith also started a company called Singlefeed that provides just that for merchants to leverage across multiple engines), apparently Shopping.com is really hacking merchants off and not doing themselves any favors as we get into the holiday shopping season!

I believe it was some time in 1996 that I purchased this suit, online, from Lands End. A suit was probably one of the worst things you could buy online, especially back at the dawn of ecommerce retailing. But of course having moved on from being an early customer at CDNow.com and Amazon.com, and living in a somewhat remote location in New Hampshire, I was keen to buy as many of the things I had to buy, online (e.g. I bought a Canon SLR camera from Wal-mart’s website in 1997…). It wasn’t a great suit, it was the wrong color, however it fit *fairly* well and it served its purpose of helping me get a job during the corporate recruiting season. It has also given my friends the ability to make merciless fun of me over the years… If I’d instead just worn jeans, running shoes and a t-shirt to one or two interviews I could probably have gotten a job as a software engineer instead — ah, these are the things that career decisions are made of!

I don’t think I’ve worn it since 1997, so 10 years later, my wife is finally (strongly) encouraging me to donate it to Goodwill. Ah, Internet Suit, we hardly knew ye … may you go on to find a good home elsewhere.

I recently came across a new site Retrevo, which is doing some cool stuff aggregating information in the consumer electronics space. Still very much a beta, I think the tech has some great potential: one nice thing it does which I haven’t really seen a lot of elsewhere is pull in information from the manufacturer sites for many of the products including product manuals and stuff. It’s less about the vanilla comparison shopping experience (yes guys, I still love all of you guys but you are pretty vanilla these days!). There’s still a lot of room for innovation in shopping discovery and information aggregation - the amount of info out there just keeps on growing, we need to grow smarter about how we search and find the stuff we want in amongst it.

I received an email special from Office Depot today, one that was quite appealing and I actually clicked on it. It was actually for an in-store promotion, but the ad looked clickable and had several buttons for store locators and so on. Imagine my surprise when I see the above message “The web group WWW/ has not been defined”. Hmmmm.

Though I’ve talked to the folks at Office Depot many times before during my analyst days, I have not kept up with their internal structures and organization in the last year or two so I have no idea if there is still any of the animosity and odd competitiveness that I used to see in companies between web, store and catalog divisions (at one company, it got so ugly I felt like I was coming in to try to be a peace maker - but that’s a story for another time perhaps…), but you’d think that it didn’t exist anymore.

That being said, this is probably just a good-old fashioned mistake (f*(&^up is the technical term) that looks very amateurish, unfortunate especially since it seems like a decent promotion. I don’t care if its an in-store promotion - the Web can just as easily be a support channel and taking cues from lead generation firms, you CAN keep the user focused on a web page and keep 95% of them from going to your other web properties if you want — though for something like this I’d rather like to know what percentage of people are going to shop in the store vs. actually shop online instead; at the very least I’d use this as an opportunity to test that…

For a long time when people asked me about some of the ways that online shopping and commerce are different from regular brick-and-mortar commerce, one of the examples I would use would be on the promotions side… it’s not just about online shopping, but also extends through to all channels where promotion coupons or codes are utilized.. once you put out a coupon or promotion ‘code’, unless it’s truly unique and/or tied 1-1 to the person utilizing it, it will propagate and be used in unpredictable ways. Online, unless you explicitly tie it to some database, cookie, or info, it’s out there for anyone to use.

What we see today is a far smaller number of these types of (what I used to call “venture-backed coupons”) coupons. Companies are under less pressure to court unprofitable transactions in the face of multiple me-too competitors to build a customer base, since hopefully the idea of acquiring a transaction is no longer seen as the same thing as creating a loyal customer. However, sites like FatWallet and others, combined with the power of search engines do still deliver great savings for consumers willing to spend a few extra minutes in their online search.

There is lots of room for retailers to innovate on the side of smart bundling instead of just simple loss-leader products online, and if new technology can help retailers expose these deals to a larger audience and get value for these bundles everyone will win. It remains to be seen how guys like Ugenie will get real distribution and whether, in fact, they will be able to work directly with retailers to let them build consumer-attractive ads/promotions that are findable… but in the meantime I just wanted to mention the free Hertz Club Gold 1-year signup I got (save $50) for being an AAdvantage Platinum member.

Hey, if I share this widely will they stop doing this promotion? Nah, not with my traffic but theoretically, maybe. But then again maybe they’ll invest in APIs or other ways to make sure the right people get the right promotion and that means less fun for uber-search-consumers but more profitable online marketing for everyone else. “enroll at hertz.com/ftgold and provide Program Name: AAdvantage and Promotion Code: 4377. Be sure your discount number CDP 217692 appears in the General Information section of the enrollment form.”

I did some research about mobile commerce 3 or 4 years ago, and the most popular “mobile shopping” application we described that appealed to mobile phone users was the ability (as yet not really offered) to find out the prices of products at local stores. Pretty simple really. Turns out it’s (obviously) a very difficult problem to solve what with inventory availability etc. etc.

Greg Sterling discusses the issue further in talking about a startup looking to address this, NearbyNow. I’m looking forward to learning more about the company as they develop - BTW looks like they’re looking for a VP of Engineering.

Comparison Engines blog has been talking about Rob Solomon moving to take over as CEO of SideStep. Congratulations!

I’ve always liked SideStep, though recently they have seemed to be more aptly named “Sideways” with little new and compelling being visible at least from my vantage point as a consumer. The story for the last year at least has been, who is going to buy them and integrate them into a larger property etc. We will see if that is Rob’s charge.

I also feel a little bit like I’m waiting for Yahoo! Shopping to sit up and do something; any thoughts on this one? Is NexTag still for sale? hehehe.

Congrats to Kamran and the team at PriceGrabber on the $485 million acquisition of the company by Experian. I have always liked the company’s technology and have been a longtime fan of the category in general and the company in particular. Initially they were less known than higher-profile engines like MySimon (who?) but the word got out as they built the business organically, smartly, patiently over the last many years. A big win for them, and well deserved.

As the comparison shopping industry looks to continue its consolidation, it has been rumored for quite some time that Experian was a likely suitor for PG. They now have three top firms in lead generation across the major online categories: shopping (PG), mortgages etc. (LowerMyBills) and education (ClassesUSA) and I can only assume that some stuff in auto might be next. But that’s a discussion for another day…

What this also does is leaves NexTag as the only major independent player out there — so it can only be a matter of time that they get snapped up as well. The main issue there is price — $485 million would I think be too low for them (public data indicates they did over $73mm in sales last year vs. $60mm PG estimated for this year). BTW according to the release they expect to do $25mm in EBIT this year which is pretty amazing as well - thus showing it to be very scaleable and leverageable with Experian’s other web properties.

So now what’s left is either you create your own comparison shopping site (something only half baked like ShopLocal or not yet started like IAC’s RedCarpet), or you buy one. The opportunities for the latter are now almost exhausted so for NexTag it seems a question of time and price [disclosure: I am a former employee of NexTag and own shares in the company].

Wow. This story already has received a lot of attention but definitely deserves wider exposure. Note the threatened credit card charges if someone posts negative feedback, and the 4-star rating on 858 comments on Yahoo! Shopping. Ouch. Originally from Greg Yardley (+ comment).

As I indicated in an earlier post, IAC is building its own comparison shopping engine, apparently. Some good sleuthing turns up RedCarpet.com as the likely name/location of this new site. Not too much interesting there yet.

I have heard from a few industry sources that InterActiveCorp is going to build its own comparison shopping site — after Barry Diller dissed the existing ones as “boring” and with “insane valuations”. I certainly think there are things that can be done to make these sites more interesting, and it is likely that it will be a lot easier to develop these things now than when the current sites were “coming up”. But I also think he underestimates how hard it is to solve some of the problems that these sites have, quite notably that of distribution (getting traffic profitably and optimizing that traffic).

Recapitulated analysis of Barry’s Diller’s comments at shop.org re: comparison shopping. He felt that the valuations of firms like Kelkoo and Shopping.com were out of whack. And I’ll agree with him on that — BUT there are some good comparison shopping companies out there still worth picking up like NexTag (hint hint) or PriceGrabber. The key question which I honestly don’t have too much insight into, is how much they are asking for — and it’s probably too much for his liking. But he’d be crazy to not be interested in the category. That would truly be incoherent.

Crazy. At $1 to $2 billion perhaps you could have made some arguments about eBay using this to jumpstart some type of communications piece on top of its platform and expand into new areas, crossover p2p commerce with p2p communications (still a far-fetched notion in my opinion). But at $2.6 billion to (possibly) $4.1 billion, what an expensive way to try something as speculative… congrats to the Skype guys. Like Paypal before you, you engineered a marvelous deal. However, unlike Paypal I do not think you will be looking back and thinking you could have got more for selling.

Some thoughts from Jeff Clavier on the deal. I’d guess that many (most?) eBay transactions will not benefit from skype since I just don’t think that c2c or smallb2c transactors want to talk to people they don’t know– they’d rather email. Of course skype gives a synchronous IM option as well. I could be off on this, but there’s a reason lots of people prefer email for all kinds of interactions, so I’ll be VERY interested to see usage figures for these type of services on eBay. It will take a while for this to get traction, but we’ll see.

David Jackson has a good follow up from Farhad Mohit (Shopzilla) posted on his blog that’s worth reading. He makes a good point about the technology vs. brute force angle (all those part-time workers in Israel as disclosed in Shopping.com’s filings) as well as them buying lots of traffic to pump up their UVs (unique visitor) numbers. Farhad has consistently talked about their technology for the last three years, and I’m inclined to believe it vis a vis Shopping.com at least.

I expected we might see more M&A activity in the comparison shopping space, but this happened pretty quickly. EW Scripps (SSP) is buying Shopzilla (aka the company formerly known as BizRate) for $525 million in cash plus the $35 million in working capital the company has. So the shareholders get $560 million. That’s a healthy multiple, though the company appears to be earning a lot more than Shopping.com EBITDA-wise:

Founded in 1996, Shopzilla is expected to generate $30 million to $33 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization on revenue of $130 million to $140 million for the full year 2005.

Off the top of my head I think that’s not quite twice the EBITDA of Shopping (and it’s also hard to know what the above numbers are based off of for 2004), but it’s definitely a fair bit more on a last-twelve months basis given Shopping’s large marketing expenses last year. Since they plan to finance it with debt, this acquisition basically washes EBITDA with financing costs in the first year, however, being slightly dilutive.

Congrats to the Shopzilla guys, this seems like a great deal for them unless I’m missing something…. It thus seems that Scripps was really really eager to acquire a decent-sized online shopping destination (they have some decent brands driven by their media properties like HGTV.com but nothing central to leverage, to drive consumers from multiple categories to), and there aren’t that many games left in town. Also, there’s really nobody who’s nailed the home categories very well online. Maybe Scripps sees itself as being a good brand and content owner to help put that together. Their rumblings about “content” in the press release are certainly a clue to that effect — but I’d be very cautious about expecting much yield there if I were them and would certainly not expect them to invest a lot of money in that– it’s difficult to appropriately mix a content-heavy model with a more transactional lite-content model like the comparison shopping guys. There are lots of dead bodies littering that online path.

This puts NexTag in a very good position and I’m sure that there must be some suitors to look closely at the firm with it’s strong user growth rates and position as one of the few large independent online sites with a good revenue business left in the category. With the other large acquisitions in their space in the last month or so: LowerMyBills (bought by Experian), Shopping.com (eBay) and now Shopzilla (Scripps), NexTag looks like a prime acquisition candidate. Scripps wasn’t a company that immediately came to mind as an acquiror for someone in the space, I must admit, so with a wider potential pool (content owners perhaps looking more closely at this… though can you say Primedia?) and some competitive urging it may be fairly likely in the near term.

This is some intriguing reading, regarding Overstock’s strange “diamond deal” where they bought some diamonds to sell to consumers under somewhat strange circumstances using a special-purpose entity (SPE). Yes, the last time you heard that unless you’re in the biz, it was probably to do with Raptors etc. regarding Enron. Jeff Matthews has some very interesting and sometimes strange (different?) posts in general, and in specific some that are typically quite critical of Overstock.com and its CEO, Patrick Byrne.

The latest news is that eBay is buying Shopping.com for $620mm. This smacks somewhat of desparation - and eBay’s quarter must be worse than I previously thought… this one caught me by surprise because it just doesn’t seem like very much of a fit, there don’t seem to be very many synergies whatsoever. So says a quote from the NYTimes article: EBay has no plans to merge the two sites or initiate any sweeping changes in the Shopping .com site, Mr. Cobb said. Probably best anyway - how would you integrate them??

Even considering that Shopping.com has $140 million in cash, meaning the firm value here is about $480 million - that still seems rich for Shopping.com which has itself meandered as a company since its IPO of $18 a share and has had less-than-impressive revenue growth. As a revenue play it’s fairly measly in the $100-$130mm revenue range, and as a traffic play not that impressive either considering that over 60 percent of Shopping’s users are already eBay users. So not a lot of incremental value for eBay there (I also noticed more general advertising in the last week for eBay running on Yahoo! which I take to be a bad sign but then again it’s a just an isolated observation). Don’t get me wrong - Shopping is not a bad company at all (and fair disclosure: I used to work for one of their competitors) and I respect a lot of the people I know there very much… it’s just not worth this much as a company, and certainly I think it’s worth less than this to eBay. I don’t own any stock in either company but right now I’d definitely be scratching my head a bit were I an eBay stockholder.