Next Generation Shopping

March 28th was the first of the Web 2.0 Awards. Its now June and I finally got to taking a closer look at all the sites. What I found most humorous was that most of the sites are still in Beta, and some hadn’t even launched at the time! It will be interesting to keep tabs over the next several months and see which die out, and which become solid businesses.

Below is my review of just the “Retail” awards section:

First Place: Etsy

I’m a big fan of the site and the concept. The layout of the page is beautiful, and gives a very cutting-edge look… Great, except for it requiring Flash. After spending some time on the site, I realized why it had won. A niche ebay, with all the perks of Web 2.0! The Etsy marketplace covers a niche market of only unique handmade items. It lets users shop by by color, place, time and material. Features include tagging by materials used and general keywords. PayPal is integrated as the main payment system. Some additional layout features utilize Flash and remind me of Cooqy, which was created using Laszlo. Anyway, not only is Etsy’s layout very tight, the concept is equally as good. I’m not the only fan though. Pete Cashmore of Mashable seems to like it and Justin Lee posted that he does as well. Nice job, hope it does well.
Second Place: Threadless
The second runner up was Threadless. Another well-designed site. My first impression was that it was bit crowded for my liking, but still nice. It is described as “A collection of tee shirts submitted and rated by the public. Over 60000 designs have been submitted and rated, over 400 have been chosen to be printed and sold on the site.”

The site seems to have a fairly big community following, and a lot of quality submissions. For users looking to make a purchase, the site not only shows a preview of the T-Shirt, but also show people wearing the shirt. I think that is huge for the community to have related pictures of real people wearing the gear! Or in the case of this one, a image/drawing of what Michael J. Fox would look like wearing the shirt. I included it because I’m personally a fan of Back to the Future and found it humorous.

Third Place: Wists
The third runner up was wists. Wists is social shopping site similiar in usage and layout to Kaboodle. This type of shopping is definitely an interesting concept, although I haven’t found it all that useful myself. Look for these sites to continue to grow in the future. I do plan to do a post on the emerging trends and technology of social shopping used as a basis for sites like Kaboodle, Wists and recently MyPickList.

As for Wists, I hope they are really busy, because their blog and specifically their blog post about the award is really skimpy! It almost looks like splog.

Honorable Mentions

• 43deals 43deals.com
• aytozon aytozon.com
• Darmik Darmik.com
• DealMine dealmine.com
• Pricenoia Pricenoia.com
• wazima Wazima.com

Reference: http://web2.0wards.org/

Strange that nothing was posted about the Web 2.0 Awards on Mashable nor ProgrammableWeb. Those are my two general sources for Web 2.0 related topics. Oh well!

This whole Web 2.0 Awards project was organized by Kat Ortland of SEOMoz. Read more on her personal blog. I congratulate Kat on a job well done and in covering so much ground! Now here are the…

Changes I would to the Awards

.. ClipFire for 43Deals

If I was Kat I would have choosen ClipFire.com over 43deals.com. They are both a work in progress, but ClipFire is a much cleaner layout, and although could use some enhancements, generally has its act together. 43deals.com is also an innovative idea, but the site seems sloppy, and many irrelevant deals come up.

Note: 43Deals has had a face-lift and cleaned up a lot since I began writing this post a while back. But I still feel ClipFire wins out based on community involvement and general ease-of-use factors.

.. SecretPrices (or even EVrewards) for DealMine

Ok, so this is totally biased. DealMine is rewards based, whereas SecretPrices involves more common discounts such as coupon/rebate and promotion offers. DealMine.com is an interesting idea, but it definitely doesn’t give me the Web 2.0 feel. And the design is far interesting, especially the implementation of the Shopping.com API. I think a nicer choice would have have been to select evreward.com which tells the users where they can find the best cashback options.

Next Year…

Maybe I will submit a site next year, but I wonder what the awards will be called then. Will that be Web 2.1 Awards or Web 3.0? Or Web 2.0.1 RC 2 w/ HotFix 3… Yeah, sorry that’s my Microsoft developer background kicking in.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Awards, Etsy, Threadless, Wists, ClipFire, 43Deals, SEOMoz, PayPal, Shopping.com

Brian Smith over at ComparisonEngines.com is attending Google Press Day. He mentioned a resource, amonst others, on his blog that Google is releasing called Google Trends. I did a few e-commerce related searches on it to give it a try… Then a quick search for “Mobile Shopping” immediately caught my attention. Here is what the City-based breakdown looks like:

Look at that… The majority of search is coming from India. Other cities have much less search volume, and no US city is even in the top 10. I then recalled reading somewhere recently about the importance of mobile commerce in India… Oh yes, eBay just launched eBay.in Affiliate Program, now I remember. Directly from their May 2006 newsletter:

“As internet entrepreneurs, India and the eBay.in Affiliate Program represents an attractive global opportunity to website publishers. India, with a population of approximately 1.1 billion, and with just over 39% internet penetration, represents a large opportunity for affiliates. eCommerce is exploding in this English-speaking, technologically sophisticated market. One thing to consider: mobile applications and SMS are vital components of internet usage in India.”

My first time reading it I was thinking yeah, yeah. Now I’m thinking up how to get in the game!

Final Note: While the trend data from Google appears to be very useful, although my experience with it has been short to this point, it is also important to note the discrepancies between similiar keywords such as “price comparison” and “comparison shopping”. It can give you a good idea of what different regions and cultures refer to similiar terms as, which may be important in your SEO or SEM campaign. Using it in conjunction with the Overture keyword tool, and WordTracker could become a very powerful combination.

Technorati Tags: mobile shopping, mobile commerce, eBay India, google trends, SEO

My previous post on Google Ads and Penalization led me to this one. This post contains a question I hope to get some feedback on regarding Penalization of using Web Services.

How does a developer utilizing web services, specifically a Mashup developer, avoid getting penalized for duplicate content? Is this a real issue?

If severe penalization for duplicate content exists, this may effect those utilizing web services / APIs as data sources to create mashup sites. Especially using ecommerce web services and affiliate datafeeds, developers are contractually bound to use some exact content. The data provider is licensing the developer to utilize their content, however, my theory is that Google may see this as duplicate content. An example is an Amazon Associate using Amazon’s E-Commerce services to serve product, pricing, and review information.

This post from Search Engine Journal from Joe Duchesne back in July of 2005 reveals some interesting details:

“[…] Google is concerned about revolves around affiliate programs. It has been common practice for high traffic websites to establish an affiliate program. Affiliate programs themselves don’t worry Google. What it doesn’t like though, is for an affiliate program to take a template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use. Some of the higher traffic websites end up with thousands upon thousands of duplicate websites all promoting the very same things and, according to Google, not offering any real value to the internet community. A website offering this type of cookie cutter website can easily find themselves de-listed by Google as happened to Template Monster a while back. […]”

So we know straightout affiliate, “cookie-cutter” type sites will suffer in Google. But my question is should this type of content be penalized, even if there is some original content in the mix? And is it already being penalized?

Another SEJ post, by Christoph Puetz, sheds some light into this area for us:

“On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique content should be added. I do not mean like just a few different words or a link/navigation menu. If you (the webmaster) can add 15% - 30% unique content to pages where you display duplicate content the overall ratio of duplicate content compared to the overall content of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of having a page flagged as duplicate content.”

Ok, so add unique content. That might be a bit tricky for our site SecretPrices.com which consist of over a million dynamically generated pages! But we are definitely looking into ways to add unique content on portions of the site.
Christoph then goes on to say:

“Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google’s index? I don’t know.”

Great… So basically we’re back at square one!

Matt Cutts recently had a blog post about Notifying Webmasters of Penalties. I posted a comment, so I’ll see if he gets back to me on it. Eithier way the post is pretty informative, so I would suggest checking it out.

Personally, I’m not going to count on any great amount of organic Google traffic for any sites created based strongly on web services.

Here are some related readings:

• How To Avoid The Google Duplicate Content Filter, Search Engine Journal
• Duplicate Content can get You Banned, Search Engine Position
• New Duplicate Content Filter at Google, ThreadWatch

For all the SEO people out there, I’m becoming greatly bothered by Google recently. This post is for my brother, who said to me just a little while ago that he bets people running Google AdSense advertisements somehow benefitted on the Google search engine. A post on SearchEngineWatch.com by Jennifer Slegg states:

“Publishers running AdSense on their pages may find that the Mediapartners-Google bot - the special Google bot used by AdSense to determine ad targeting on a publisher page - is actually sharing the results of those crawls with the main Google search database.

Greg Boser spotted it when pages being served strictly to AdSense began showing up in the main search database. And cache dates and times are matching exactly with when the Mediapartners-Google bot visited the page for ad targeting purposes”

From JenSense:

“But this is definite clear cut evidence that yes, the mediabot is sharing info with the googlebot, and possibly vice versa.”

As this isn’t really an area I generally cover, a full article and details are available in the April 16th post on JenSense.com.

Other mentions:

• Using AdSense to get in the Google SERPS? - addictedtoads.com
• AdSense Bot Working Overtime - webguerrilla.com

Technorati Tags: seo, google, googlebot, adsense, google adsense