Next Generation Shopping

My previous post of The Next Generation of Deal Sites shared my vision for a model for future deal sites as a shopping comparison hybrid. This follow-up is another interesting concept. A deal aggregator. The one that first comes to my mind is ClipFire, which launched the beginning of this year. It essentially works by aggregating RSS feeds from a variety of different deal sites, and pushing the information into a searchable database. The social part comes into play as users are allowed to vote (or “clip”) their favorite deals and tag them.

Kevin Carey is the creator of this ClipFire service, but some are curious of how he can swing a profit from it. On a TechCrunch post from earlier this year Michael Arrington reviewed the service, and several readers posted some interesting comments regarding the issue of the site generating revenues. One that caught my attention was an idea to manipulate the RSS changing the affiliate IDs 50% of the time. Aside from being an issue of morals, and the pains involved in doing that, it that basically throws the whole point of the community site out the window. Pete Cashmore, of the Mashable.com blog, believes a better approach would have been to split revenue with users and let them post the deals. His review of the ClipFire service, which calls it Digg for Deals, is a skeptical one. Pete I agree with you on the point of perhaps filling up with spam in the future, but only if the site becomes very popular! And what isn’t filling with spam these days?

At this point the site itself seems to be doing fairly well, but I haven’t really heard much buzz about it recently. It has seemed to follow the inevitable trend of “mashups” to have a large traffic spike and then seem to bottom-out after the initial buzz has passed. Check out the Alexa graph below:

As far as the service itself goes, a suggestion I would have Kevin consider is perhaps trying to utilize regular expressions to draw out the expiration date. I’ve used ClipFire myself several times, but on more than one occasion expired information shows up at the top. Stowe Boyd picked up on another problem that didn’t really cross my mind… The issue of different currencies. Stowe states:

“I already noticed one problem: costs of various products are not normalized to the end users currency. I saw deals for London hotel stays provided in pounds, for example. And the cost of goods are embedded in the text associated with the deal, not pulled out as a primary attribute. There is as a result no way to sort by price, which seems an obvious thing to do.”

While making the results sortable by price is definitely not as easy as it sounds, it might be a good idea to determine prior to aggregation what country the feed is coming from. The problem lies within the fact that the deal information is not in a structured format, thus you can’t easily determine the price, just as you can’t easily determine the expiration date. Perhaps it is time for a “deals” microformat!

[tags]deals, clipfire, social search, social shopping, community commerce, digg, microformats[/tags]

• Review of the Web 2.0 Awards Retail Section
• Shopping Comparison on the Go
• Duplicate Content Issues – How They Affect You
• The Next Generation of Deal Sites – The Deals and Shopping Comparison Hybrid
• SecretPrices.com Launch