DealTime becomes Shopping.com
Shopping site DealTime Inc. has officially become Shopping.com Inc., reflecting the integration of DealTime.com and Epinions.com, which DealTime acquired earlier this year. Shopping.com is a comparison shopping site and provider of pay-for-performance marketing services that hosts 1.5 million visitors a day to its web site. It expects to have more than 5,000 participating merchants by Christmas, Iggy Fanlo, head of sales and chief revenue officer, tells InternetRetailer.com
"Shopping.com delivers on everything we’ve learned over the past four years, including what people like and dislike about shopping,” said Nirav Tolia, Shopping.com’s COO. “Our long-term goal is to offer people all of the relevant information on every product and store in the world.”
Shopping.com reports that it includes 1.4 million consumer reviews and price information on more than 5 million products from more than 3,000 stores. It also includes coupons and discount information. Epinions.com will continue to operate under its own URL.
The company is now positioning Shopping.com to differ from other online shopping malls and product comparison sites by offering new shopping features along with a broad range of products, excluding travel services, Fanlo says. At the same time, it has shored up what it considered weaknesses of DealTime.com as a shopping search engine. "Our search engine was relatively poor at DealTime, so we decided to change that with Shopping.com," he says.
For example, Shopping.com’s search engine was designed to recognize parts of speech in search inquiries, such as whether the term "black dress shoes" is being used to find black shoes or a black dress, Fanlo says. In addition, the site also incorporates unpatented features from other established sites, including token proximity, which helps a search mechanism know the difference between "white roses" and "red roses in a white vase."
Fanlo says Shopping.com will also emphasize search relevance over paid placement, so that an item found through natural search will appear higher than paid-placement listings as long as it is more relevant to a consumer’s search. "If a product is more relevant, it will appear higher than something that paid more for placement," Fanlo says.
The site will also show prices for shipping and tax along with retail prices on each product. It also offers a new
Fanlo says Shopping.com will also limit its focus to the U.S. and U.K. markets for now. "In the past, we had too many international sites," he says, noting that the sites for Japan and Germany have been temporarily mothballed.
Shopping.com Inc. is privately-held and backed by key strategic partners including August Capital, Bain Capital, Benchmark Capital, Bertelsmann, Goldman Sachs, Israel Seed Partners and others.
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