Saturday, May 29, 2010

Product Data Feed Management for Shopbots

There are many product feed management services to help online vendors manage their product listing on various shopbots. Most data feed management service allow a vendor to manage their data feed to all major shopbots from Googe Product Search, Amazon.com, Kelkoo, MySimon, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, Yahoo Shopping, MSN Shopping, etc.

Here is a list of such feed management services:
ChannelAdvisor.com
SingleFeed.com
productfeedmanager.com

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Comparison-shopping for online travelling

Probably because of the SABRE system was one of the first online traveling system being developed, Web-based online traveling information comparison is a very sophisticated and developed comparison-shopping category. The current top 3 online travelling portals are Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com.

These three portals consolidated flight, hotel, and car rental information.A consumer could book and compare a complete travel package by using any of them. They also provide search engine for numerous online travel service companies like tripadvisor.com. In addition, services like priceline.com allows a consumer to offer a price for a flight, hotel or other travel services, and vendors to compete for the business.

There are also second generation comparison-shopping services in this category like Kayak.com, which retrieval information from the top 3 portals as well as other airline companies and then compare them for consumers to find the best air travel deals. hotelicopter.com did similar things for hotel reservations.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Search Neutrality

A recent article by New York Times about the anti-trust against Google mentioned a lawsuit launched by a UK couple and owner of one of the top UK-based shopbot, Foundem.co.uk. According to them:
"in 2006, Google’s supposedly objective algorithms suddenly dropped Foundem into the netherworld of Google search results. They say Google also raised the rates Foundem had to pay to advertise alongside search results. These moves, the couple say, pushed their comparison shopping site out of view, and Google later put the spotlight on its own shopping listings."
Thiscouple raised an interesting issue of search neutrality. How to define search neutrality. According to them, search neutrality is
"the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet."
 Specifically,
"search neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, search engines should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, search engines should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online." 
The idea of regulation on search control has important implications to the Web. Shall Google have impartial attitude to all Web sites it listed on its search outcome? How to define impartial here? It seems we use Google is not because Google give us impartial results, it is because Google help us find things we want to find easier compared with other search engine. As to whether this result is being manipulated by Google, most users probably do not care about. To certain extent, all search outcome are manipulated by certain algorithms. In the case of Google, it is PageRank plus some proprietary tweaks we don't know.

On the other side, US government does have regulations on search outcome in the case of American Airline. When SABRE system was found to display American Airline's flight information on top of the search outcome compared with the same route offered by other airline companies, the Congress forced it to eliminate such bias.

So the case probably will be determined by whether there is a strong evidence that Google did manipulate the search outcome to benefit its own business interests.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Fraudulent on product ratings and reviews

Though shopbot and comparison-shopping could help us find good price, the reputation of the vendor offering that price is equally important. Unfortunately, a recent article by pcworld.com revealed many fraudulent practice by online vendors to boost up their reputation in shopbots while, in reality, have a lot of consumer complaints. The reporter basically compare the ratings given on major comparison-shopping site for an online vendor with its BBB reviews and found there were a lot of discrepancies.

For example, here is a case with butterfly photo:
Our investigation showed that leading shopping engines, including Shopzilla.com, Shopping.com,PriceGrabber.com, and Yahoo Shopping, frequently award accolades to companies with spotty records. Nearly a third of the merchants that came up in our searches for popular consumer electronics on Yahoo Shopping, for example, had "unsatisfactory" ratings with the BBB.
What's the source of the problem? Shopping engines depend on customer ratings to make these recommendations--and ratings and reviews can be faked by interested parties. That isn't a new phenomenon, but unfortunately, we found evidence that some shopping engines--despite their claims to the contrary--are still being manipulated to get customers to visit certain online stores. 
When we asked Shopzilla how a company with an unsatisfactory BBB rating could earn its "Smart Choice" seal, Shopzilla spokesperson Helen Malani said, "Ratings and reviews are just one component in the shopper's decision-making process." She wouldn't say whether recommending Butterfly Photo, in retrospect, was a mistake.
Shopzilla, however, wasn't the only engine recommending Butterfly Photo. When we searched on Shopping.com for a Samsung 32-inch television, Butterfly Photo's offering again earned special attention, showing up in the search results as a "Smart Buy." The "Smart Buy" seal, according to Shopping.com, indicates that the search result is the lowest available price from a "Trusted Store." Shopping.com's sibling sites, Dealtime.com andPricetool.com, also displayed Butterfly Photo's price with the Trusted Store logo. NexTag.com and its sibling site, Calibex.com, show "Trusted Seller" logos that indicate Butterfly Photo has received positive customer ratings, displays accurate prices, and "address[es] customer service complaints quickly and fairly." 
Though even shopbot owners are aware there are fake ratings, detecting them is usually difficult. Finding duplicate ratings and comments and delete them is one method. Bad vendors could be removed from the listing. However, bad vendors soon change their names as new companies and being listed again. It is even more shocking to see one comment to the article:

Change you passwords when using these sites. I posted a very negative review of a purchase I had made at a store called Computer Geeks on PriceGrabber. The next day a nice, happy review was up with my name on it. I had used the same user name and password for both sites. To PriceGrabbers credit they did replace the glowing review with my original, you just can't see it on page two, which is inaccessible (maybe today only), and page one is loaded with 100% positive posts which appear to be just as fake as the one that replaced mine.
There are also social and economics issues in entangled with this issue. The comparison-shopping service providers has little incentive to pay a hefty cost to detect and prevent fraudulent ratings because it is not just costly but also don't generate short-term profit. However, in the long run, the reputation and credibility of shopbot service sector will be damaged if consumers found out they were cheated frequently by such information.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Byzantine, Texas: Comparison shopping for religious items

I found an interesting blog about comparison-shopping for religious items:

Imperfect comparison: promotions, rebates and coupons prevents directly comparison

Comparison-shopping helps consumers find best price for a product. Does that mean shopbots will eventually become the first stop of online shopping? At least for now, it is not.

Online stores use a lot of tricks to attract consumers by offering lower price than those listed by shopbots. For example, the rebates. There are a few rebate sites like ebates.com actually offer rebates for a wide range of partnering online stores. There are also quite a few deal sites offer coupon and rebate information about online stores. To name a few, dealnews.com, dealsea.com, techbargains.com, mrrebates.com, etc.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

auto insurance comparison

To buy auto insurance is a complex process. There are many depends. There are no best insurance company for all drivers. It largely depends on the driver's driving history. It worth a lot of research to explore how to streamline the selection process and make individual find their best rate with much ease.

Every state government site lists agents and insurance companies by their insurance commissioner. So the state resident could file complaint. So one can look at the list and find the one has the fewest complaints. Epinion.com runs a section for consumers to review all type of insurances including auto insurance. Currently there are 92 insurance company entries. Those ratings could be misleading because many insurance companies have very few number of reviews.

There are several comparison-shopping agents specializing on insurance including auto insurance like insurance.com, insweb.com, netquote.com, and lowerratequotes.com. But some of them are merely collecting your information and then send to potential insurers.

Some innovative services by new insurance companies makes the comparison even more complex. For example, progressive.com will lower your rate if you agree to install a GPS device on your car so they can monitor your driving habit. milemeter.com will charge your premium based on the actual miles you covered in each month. So how to compare them and find the best one for one customer is really a challenge.

Monday, May 17, 2010

another shopbot launched

How many shopbots being launched every month? How many ceased to exist at the same duration?
The entry barrier for comparison-shopping service is much lowers nowadays. Retailers are aware of the advantage of being listed by a shopbot so most of them don't block probes by new shopbots. They even pay to participate those popular shopbots.


I came across a newly launched shopbot called onewayshopping today. It is a simple collection of popular price quotes by popular online retailers like drugstore.com, bestbuy.com, etc. It was launched in 2009. The shopping category includes: apparel, auto&vehicles, Babies&kids, cameras, computers, electronics, entertainment, flowers and gifts, health and beuaty, home and garden, industrial supply, jewelry and watches, musical instruments, office, pets, sprots, toys & hobbies, and video games. All have a relatively high profit margin.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

An article on the evolution of shopbot

This year is the 15th anniversary of BargainFinder demonstration project. BargainFinder was one of the first shopbots launched in 1995. It was developed as a research project by then Andersen Consulting. I wrote an article about this project and was published by IEEE computer in May 2010 issue. This article also presented several challenges for the future evolution of shopbots. 


Article: "What's Next for Shopbots?," Computer, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 20-26, Apr. 2010, doi:10.1109/MC.2010.93