Category “Shopping on the web”

Kelkoo press release today: Kelkoo, the shopping and travel comparison website, today reveals the result of a major brand and business overhaul across its ten European and three international markets. Following extensive consumer research and a site re-design which will be completed across all markets by the end of October, the company announces its ambition [...]

From the press release: SAN FRANCISCO, May 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — TheFind, a leading facilitator of online, mobile, and offline commerce and partner to thousands of stores and brands, today launched CATALOGUE – the only app that re-imagines the $100 billioncatalog shopping experience for iPad and Android tablets. At launch, CATALOGUE includes the spring collections [...]

Google Product Search has a new homepage on its US version, organized into three sections -“Popular This Week”, a seasonal “Gifts for Grads” (?), and “Recently viewed” ; each section supporting a carousel to browse products and tooltips when rolling over a product. I feel this is a really great design for a homepage – [...]

Twenga has rolled out a new user interface, available on most of the markets where it operates, including FR, UK, US… Overall, a lightened and streamlined interface that brings a fresh air to Twenga. (Very) quick review: New site header with cleaner layout, a more proeminent search. “Twenga, the biggest choice online” as the new [...]

In June 2010, I wrote: For me, the mission of CSEs is to make customers aware of available products and help them for their purchase decisions… As such, CSEs should start aggregating the various offers from the deal of the day / group buying sites, and through personalization (geography, center of interest…) tailor the experience [...]

November 2010: first spotted test of a new homepage design… December 2010: a new personal toolbar, first bit of the new design, goes live… February 2011: new bucket test spotted with homepage and site header updated… PriceGrabber is moving carefully with the testing of its new site! Today, I have been exposed to a new [...]

TheFind first demonstrated its teams were working on visual search back in 2009; but this experimentation never made it into its live product… until now. Announced on TheFind blog this week: Starting today, when you shop for clothing, shoes, accessories and most home goods, you’ll have the ability to shop for visually similar items.  Take [...]

Twenga is following a route initiated by TheFind – a deep Facebook integration that ultimately can affect the content of search result pages. In light of those changes, here is the new Twenga mission statement: Our mission Help you make the best choice. On any product, ask for a friend’s opinion with one click. To [...]

From Google Blog: Instant results in the “Shopping” view Now you can shop faster than ever and get the speed of Google Instant when comparing prices, looking for nearby stores and learning about products you want to buy. For example, if you’re searching for a cast iron skillet, we’ll start showing you relevant pans as [...]

Kelkoo launching Kelkoo Select, Shopzilla launching Tada, Google strengthening its local shopping product, Milo acquired by eBay (also owner of Shopping.com)… 2010 has seen a lot of initiatives by comparison shopping engines to add a local dimension to their pure online shopping proposition. Last but not least, Twenga has (quietly) launched Twenga Exclusive, a directory [...]

Google has officially launched its Chrome Web Store yesterday. I wouldn’t say I like this approach of a walled garden web… I recognize the value and appreciate the beauty of (some) native applications on the Apple platform, even if I believe a more mature HTML5 could replace those apps in the future. So seeing a [...]

Displayed at the bottom of each page of the PriceGrabber site, the so-called “Ribbon” is a sticky toolbar defined by PriceGrabber as: The PriceGrabber Ribbon offers you quick and easy access to our features. With the PriceGrabber Ribbon you can track recently viewed products, save favorites, set price alerts, and even compare product features side [...]

Homepage Firstly, there is this new homepage with various merchandising placements: “Popular products” / “Holiday gift guides” / “Seasonal” / “Checkout deals”. The last time Google Product Search put some merchandising modules on its homepage, it was only seasonal ; but it seems this homepage could make sense all year long… At the bottom of [...]

Long time, no blogging… Not that there are no news in the CSEs world these days though… In a few months, Smarter and Nextag have launched complete redesigns, including new logo and new visual identity. PriceGrabber is also testing a refreshed look; and TheFind has introduced a more content-oriented homepage. Quick review… Smarter Visually speaking, [...]

Kelkoo has entered the crowdy market of group buying / local deals sites by beta-launching Kelkoo Select: “Kelkoo Select is a brand new shopping site where you can sign up for free to receive exclusive offers on anything from fine dining, product deals, adventure days out, preview theatre tickets and spa weekends taking place every [...]

In Europe, Google Product Search was only available in UK and Germany till yesterday and its stealth launch in France. Stealth, as I haven’t seen any official comment on any of the Google blogs, but only tweets (who was the first one to notice? :) ). Stealth, also because it doesn’t seem to be linked [...]

I’ve noticed Shopzilla has stopped using product clustering on hard goods categories, like Digital Cameras or MP3 Players. I can only regret that decision, that seems more about generating short-term revenues (no product clustering means users are one-click closer to the merchant websites) rather than improving the user experience… From category pages, the product pages [...]

(New job, side projects, recovered capacities to go hiking… That explains while I’m a bit late in the blogging game these days…) In this month of September, the most exciting news in the CSE world is coming from TheFind. Early September, TheFind has announced a new set of social features, as a kind of follow-up [...]

Most CSEs now have an iPhone application, but few of them have launched a dedicated app for the iPad yet. When Nextag and Pricegrabber launched their own iPad apps, those apps were mostly the existing iPhone apps adapted to the bigger screen of the iPad. As a consequence, while being quite efficient, they were also [...]

Poland is a 38M people country – which is quite important for European standards – and as such sees a lot of local start-ups developing innovative ideas and products. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for me to review Polish sites as I don’t know a single word in Polish; which is a shame considering there are some [...]

Here are two nice UI elements that I have recently discovered on the Zappos and Amazon websites. Multiple-image browsing at Zappos It’s common to see multiple-image browsing on product pages, but it’s pretty rare on search result pages. And it always comes with more UI weight (icon to open the browsing widget, or prev/next icons [...]

Measy is an almost 1 year old shopping decision engine that relies on a quiz-based system to help shoppers identify the best product for their needs. Those quizzes are really interesting alternatives to classic faceted navigation that most shopping engines use to let users filter down products; in a way, they are similar to the [...]

I love the new homepage for non-logged users on Hunch… For me, It’s a perfect example of emotional design, a term that I have discovered through two recent articles (“Time to delight” and “An Event Apart: Emotional Interface Design”). Quick review of this homepage: A strong tagline: “Hunch personalizes the internet” with an asterisk that [...]

As a follow-up of its May release that introduced Facebook login and a new “My Store” feature, TheFind has just released tweaks to its sharing and personalization options. Quick review: Sharing options via Facebook, Twitter and email are now available on every page and on every offer. The options to filter results by location or [...]

Microsoft has officially give details about the future of Bing Shopping once its cashback will be stopped on July, 30th. With no surprise, the new Bing Shopping will become a free program, similar to Google Product Search. All the details for merchants are available on a “List your product catalogs on Bing for free” page. [...]

In a post entitled “Improving the Product Search experience”, Google has announced it will require unique identifiers to be provided through data feed for specific categories (emphasis is mine): Over the past year, we’ve launched a number of exciting features on Google Product Search. Users can now access YouTube videos, product reviews, and other information [...]

From Kelkoo press release: Kelkoo.com launches in Beta in the USA as part of global brand building strategy, the 11th territory for the company At launch, Kelkoo.com will offer access to over 2 million product offers from more than 1,500 online retailers, including 19 of the US’s top 25 This is expected to rise to [...]

On TechCrunch, an interesting article entitled “Did Amazon miss the social commerce boat?”: Few will dispute Amazon’s role as current king of the e-commerce space, but this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference raised an interesting question: Did Amazon miss the boat on social commerce? [...] All of the panelists seemed to agree that Amazon will continue [...]

I’ve had a wonderful 4-days week-end in the south of France doing hot air ballooning, visiting old small villages and enjoying local food (so French, isn’t it? :) )… There has been a big CSE-related news during those few days: the announcement that the Bing Cashback program will end on July, 30 2010 through a [...]

This is a follow-up to the article I wrote in March, detailing which browsers are used in each country where Kelkoo operates. I’m publishing the new stats for May (from May 1st to May 29th), as the situation has evolved since March: At the global level, we can observe an important migration of users from [...]

I don’t know when those changes have been released (I would say they are a few weeks old) but even if small, they give some hints regarding the directions TheFind is going towards. Facebook integration TheFind has implemented Facebook Connect as an alternative to its custom login solution (quick check on other CSEs: few of [...]

On Friday, I thought it could be a production issue; so I’ve checked today but the results are the same. What happens to ProntoTech, one of the vertical of Pronto? Firstly, they have reverted the new offer design introduced in July 2009 to something less radical: back to list view instead of grid, the return [...]

Adobe has recently launched the 5th revision of its Creative Suite. Among all the updated products, Photoshop CS5 is really exciting for photographers; and therefore I’m currently thinking of buying it… Photoshop CS5 comes in different flavors: Standard or Extended version Windows or Macintosh Full package or upgrade from a previous version Box or download [...]

On the Bing blog: A lot of us don’t shop alone. Going to the mall is often a social thing, so why should shopping online be any different? 75% of shoppers seek advice from others even when shopping online and now Bing shoppers can too! In the last announcement we refreshed the look of the [...]

The new design for Google Search, whose several iterations have been spotted in the previous months, is now live: you can read the article on SearchEngineLand for a complete review. For the shopping side of things, it is to be noted that the user interface of Product Search has also been improved, in order to [...]

From Google blog: Brand refinements in search results Sometimes when searching for product information on Google, you may not know some of the brand names relevant to your particular search. For example, if you’re taking on a new river-rafting hobby, it’s quite likely you don’t have a clue about kayak manufacturers just yet. So, we [...]

This article is part of a series discussing what could be the perfect CSE for 2010. Following discussions on the core business of shopping engines (product search, product discovery, where to buy), I wanted to discuss the question of social interactions on CSEs… But after several weeks of thinking and numerous iterations of this article, [...]

Read on the GoodGuide corporate blog: […] we are rolling out a suite of new features, new pages, and a redesign of the website to create a simpler and more personal user experience. First, we are launching new and improved product, brand, company, and category pages. We have added content that users have been requesting [...]

BizRate improving its faceted navigation, Bing Shopping launching new features, Shopping.com tuning its header and search pages… These days, CSEs are busy improving their core business, and Twenga is doing the same by updating its search result pages. Quick review of the changes… Filtering The main change concerns the faceted navigation that is removed from [...]

From PCAdvisor: Ciao, the shopping comparison site that is integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, is offering web users the chance to look at products on the site in 3D. The site is using Microsoft’s Photosynth technology, which stitches several images of the same scene or item together, allowing users to view the product or [...]

Bing has announced a new version of its US shopping engine (the European shopping section is still powered by Ciao!). Quick review of the changes… Product clustering on hard and soft goods While this is not in the announcement, it seems Bing has enabled product clustering on all product types, including hard and soft goods. [...]

Following its new site launched in November’09, BizRate has recently fined-tuned the user interface of its search result pages. The redesign is not available on all categories, but I’m currently able to see it on the Digital Camera pages. Quick review below… General The new layout uses a fluid design, as opposed to the fixed [...]

This article is part of a series discussing what could be the perfect CSE for 2010. In previous articles, I discussed the opportunity for CSEs to implement a true product search, using product clustering for both hard and soft goods; and explored how to improve browsing through those products. In this follow-up, I would like [...]

On Google India blog this morning: Google’s new Shopping tool for India gathers information about products and prices automatically – the system scans millions of Indian Web pages and extracts product names, prices and images. With the help of this new technology, Google users will receive information from more than 30 thousand Indian Internet sites [...]

In a previous article, I explained how to better use Google Analytics to track browser usage on a site. Adjusting your browser strategy by looking at stats and trends is great, however when designing a new site, how to decide which browsers to target?  The only reference is the global stats of the browser market [...]

Even if I really appreciate TheFind for the innovations it brings to the CSE world, there is one area where I think its product currently lags: search relevancy. Indeed, with an index of 400M merchant offers (as claimed in press releases), noise in search result pages becomes an issue; and TheFind currently doesn’t have that [...]

This is the 200th article published in the category “Shopping on the web” on this blog. The first one was published in March 2006, was written in French and talked about Windows Live Shopping, a new CSE announced by Microsoft. Yes, CSEs (Comparative Shopping Engines, also called Shopping Search or Price Comparison websites…) would soon [...]

This article is part of a series discussing what could be the perfect CSE for 2010. In a previous article, I discussed the opportunity for CSEs to implement a true product search, using product clustering for both hard and soft goods. Among the benefits of this approach is the ability to attach content to those [...]

From the Google AdWords blog: You may recall that towards the end of 2009, we began testing a new feature called AdWords Comparison Ads. This feature lets users compare multiple relevant offers with ease, and it provides advertisers with a new sophisticated and flexible cost per lead format. Speed is of the essence for many [...]

The “web of things” Yahoo! recently talking about its search strategy, and how it can still innovate on search: People don’t care about finding 5 million pages about Roger Federer, they want the one page with all the relevant information. If someone is looking for Black Eyed Peas, we want to show users a bubble [...]