Online shopping is supposed to be worth $211 billion in the U.S. alone this year, according to Forrester. At this point everyone from the big guys, the established names, on down, has a shopping comparison site, helping people find their way to hundreds of thousands of web-based stores and often taking a cut of consequent sales.
We’ve come across a couple of stealthy startups, TheFind and Ugenie, that promise to polish up online comparison-shopping. Both swear off paid placement in their business models, choosing alternatives like advertising and affiliate fees that don’t affect search results. And both have taken nice chunks of venture money to play out their experiments.
Branding is going to be really important for these vertical search engines, from the “shopcasting” of companies like ThisNext, to review aggregation from ViewScore and others, to bookmarking tools like Kaboodle — not even counting all the shopping, auction, and bazaar sites themselves — there are just too many names in this space. Pretty soon we’re going to need a comparison shopping engine for comparison shopping engines.
The first new site, TheFind, is the second coming of FatLens, the ticket search engine. We’d been told more than once that FatLens is a proof-of-concept; now the company has taken the password protection off the real concept: a product index generated by a shopping-optimized web crawler. The Mountain View-based company claims 500,000 stores and 150 million products are currently loaded up.
TheFind’s most interesting features are monitoring demand and supply to find the most popular products among retailers and bring them higher in results, registering price changes to flag sales, and saving marked items in a tray that’s anchored to the bottom of your screen no matter where you navigate.
The company, which has 27 employees and is based in Mountain View, has taken $8 million in first-round funding from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Cambrian Ventures, and is closing a Series B round now.
Another new startup in the space, Ugenie, which plans to launch in beta next week, is singularly focused on price comparison. The company adds two nice features to online shopping: first, computing taxes, shipping, discounts, and coupons (even finding coupon codes for you) to compare the actual “credit card damage”; and second, taking your multiple-item shopping list and finding the best way to bundle products across sites to minimize shipping charges and maximize discounts.
Ugenie also does its own crawling and extraction but for now it is manually limited to about 40 sites and the categories of books, music, movies, and games. The company says it hopes to get more involved with merchants in order to bundle products on the merchant side as well and to do online/offline price comparison.
The company was founded last May by two Amazon alums, Krishna Motukuri and Harish Abbot. It has raised $5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures and now has 15 employees.
Elsewhere in online comparison shopping, Mpire added features similar to both TheFind and Ugenie: increased support for coupons, pricing information, and trends, this week. Become.com added color search.
C’mon now. Isn’t the point of comparison-shopping to save us from going to a whole bunch of sites? We think TheFind and Ugenie make nice incremental improvements on what’s out there; let us know if it’s enough to draw you in.
28 comments so far
6:33 AM PT
I was beta testing thefind.com the other day. And all I can say is I am disappointed with the interface and data. I don’t see myself using it. The price is outdated and their crawler used some Fuzzy logic that does guessing game with the page layout.
I think the investors will find it disappointing. With $8 million and 27 employees for 3 years, they could of done a better job. From what I know focusdeals.com was done by 1 guy with $1200. It seem the technology is more precise.
I have been using pronto.com and focusdeals.com.
Pronto.com is great for my plugin in firefox.
Later…
6:53 AM PT
On the Internet, we always seem to be ’searching’. Whether it is shopping deals, pictures, music or anything else, we are always searching. Any company that provides a meaningful and effective search tool will flourish.
7:12 AM PT
I was looking around some “new-breed” shopping sites too this week and came across a social shopping one called “Crowdstorm”. They focus on showing the buzzy products and I reckon its worth a look.
8:54 AM PT
I also came across http://DealsPl.us, which is Web2.0 shopping commnuity. You can find a good deal quickly.
9:06 AM PT
Everyone’s outgoogleing google. I wonder if the single field is here to stay.
10:07 AM PT
TheFind.com…
A new comparison shopping site TheFind.com launched today as an all-encompassing shopping search site. The Company has garnered a bit of buzz, with an interesting write-up at GigaOm and Comparison Engines. Although I like the principle, it’s r…
10:20 AM PT
i really like what viewscore.com is doing
review aggregation is a killer app.
1:11 PM PT
With our beta launch of TheFind.com, we are excited to offer the most comprehensive shopping search experience online today. This comprehensiveness allows us to understand the market dynamics of online commerce, and rank products and stores by what is most popular at a high-level, rather than by who pays us the most to advertise. Comprehensiveness, unbiased and relevant results, and an efficient design/experience are in the best interest of consumers, and that is what we have been focused on at TheFind.
To clarify, we were venture funded in Jan 2005, and launched our proof-of-concept site, FatLens, in event-ticket search in June 2005 (just over a year ago). TheFind.com marks our evolution to a multi-category online shopping search engine. We are excited to address previously underserved categories such as apparel, health and beauty, home & garden, kids and family - areas that go beyond the traditional electronics and computers categories.
With our beta launch, we are actively seeking feedback, in order to improve the site before coming out of the beta phase. Online shopping continues to grow, and we are excited to offer a new way of shopping online that is in the best interest of consumers, through comprehensive, unbiased and relevant, and efficient results.
8:50 PM PT
Isn’t Ugenie same as textbookgenie?
http://www.textbookgenie.com/
except of course, better gui and music/dvd/games.
2:13 PM PT
I work for Wize. Wize ranks products primarily on quality as opposed to price. If you’re into comparison-shopping sites, or like most everyone else on the thread, working for one, it’s well worth a look.
2:37 PM PT
Thank you for this post.
AddThis.com makes it easy to collect products on the web and save them to any social/comparison shopping services. AddThis currently supports: Kaboodle, MyPickList, Wists, StyleHive, StyleFeeder, ThisNext. Looks like we should probably add these new services as well.
2:51 PM PT
Thanks for the shout out to Become.com for our new color search. We think Become.com is the one stop site that does it all for shoppers. We provide highly relevant product research based on our finely tuned algorithms and comparison shopping with all the bells and whistles from search by color, style, price and brand to providing total tax and shipping info and locating nearby stores for when you absolutely gotta have it today.
5:01 AM PT
SmartShopper (http://www.smartshopper.com) uses smart product recognition and matching technology to actually recognize what it is people are looking to buy online and helpthem make better-informed decisions. It gives them everything they need at their exact point of search or purchase, including sotre and product ratings, reviews, tax and shipping info, local currency conversion, and even real-time eBay auction listings. Check it.
8:17 PM PT
Let me be the first to call “bullshit” on TheFind.com’s claim to have crawled 500,000 stores. Assuming they only cover the US, I suspect we’re dealing with funny numbers here.
I challenge this company to publish its list of stores, with the URLs of their homepages, for all to see. If they really have this many, it’s a simple database dump and they should be proud to show off this accomplishment.
9:03 PM PT
(In response to the comment from Mandeep)
It’s all in the parsing … the article says that (1) TheFind uses a web-crawler and (2) they have 500,000 stores loaded up.
You have unnecessarily made (2) a consequence of (1). They are probably using the EBay and Amazon APIs (those sites do not permit crawling) and I’m guessing the total number of EBay and Amazon stores contributes greatly to the number.
Perhaps I should say it’s all in the marketing…
2:10 AM PT
Good point, D Ashcart. I suspect you’re right– eBay and Amazon stores are probably contributing hundreds of thousands of stores to this number.
I suspect the average consumer thinks of these stores as simply part of eBay and Amazon. But “hundreds of thousands” sounds much more impressive than “two”. Ain’t marketing grand?
Of course, my challenge to TheFind still stands.
2:31 PM PT
Just having tested like.com, (launched today) I find the ChezImelda.com implementation for shoes still the most straight forward. Has been around for 2 months now and growing. They have 90,000 pairs, they allow you to click on shoe images, the network recentres in a milisecond, with 5 clicks you know the shoe universe and you are happy to go and purchase. Great tool…
10:12 PM PT
Addthis is OK, but I prefer Socialite because you can set it to post blog articles or websites to multiple social networks automatically instead of just one with addthis.
2:26 PM PT
at eDistiller, they rank the products based on quality. But they also allow you to search by Value. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but so far as I can tell it’s a measure of quality per dollar spent… at it’s not too bad.
6:01 AM PT
Online shopping with price comparisons has now come to India. Bechna.com looks like the first off the starting blocks. I’ve been using them to check a few prices already…and made a couple of purchases online. Not a bad start. Still a long way to go for online shopping in India. Very much in its infancy.
11:41 AM PT
Spot Cost http://www.spotcost.com
It is very hard to show accurate prices. That is what we are trying to be better at: more accurate prices, more accurate product information. Please let us know how we are doing.
Thanks
Chris
8:47 AM PT
HagglePoint.com is another website making waves that’s worth a look.
7:53 PM PT
I also like http://www.ShopWiki.com
They crawl all the ecommerce stores out there so you know you’ve searched everywhere for that great deal. I heard they just launched a site in the UK as well: http://www.QuickShop.co.uk
1:22 AM PT
bechna seems the only indian comparison website around.. even that’s been relaunched recently - this time around they seem more serious.
11:48 PM PT
SmartShopper (Comparison Shopping) uses smart product recognition and matching technology to actually recognize what it is people are looking to buy online and helpthem make better-informed decisions. It gives them everything they need at their exact point of search or purchase, including sotre and product ratings, reviews, tax and shipping info, local currency conversion, and even real-time eBay auction listings. Check it.
2:05 PM PT
[...] Glimpse.com for an undisclosed amount of money. My bet is that TheFind is bulking up to compete with rivals such as Kaboodle, which now has the backing of magazine giant Hearst [...]
7:25 PM PT
Thanks . I just across a site which is targeted at Australian consumers.
http://www.topbargains.com.au/
However, most of the community based bargain sharing sites are emerging in the US only and there are very few of them for consumers like countries in UK and Australia. Hopefully they catch up soon.
9:05 PM PT
I just came across a site I used to buy my books called SmartBookFinder.com, http://www.smartbookfinder.com. They are book price comparison search engine. I find their interface very user friendly and fast. They also have a book buyback & book rental comparison service. I find their book rental comparison very interesting, haven’t ever scene that before.
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