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p.s. dunno if this is the right forum..mods can move/delete as required.
I don't think the sort by price or search by price is working. Searching for a certain men's accessory, the prices range from about $19 to $950, but when sorting by price, all it shows is $79 and $125. Also, searching for $18 to $20 doesn't turn up the $19 item.
CompWorld
The heat is on now that Yahoo will be unveiling it's product search in the next few weeks. Hopefully, Froogle will be as big a success as Google News.
Uh...no...not unless merchants want to compete solely on price. (I could be the cheapest in my industry if I provided the poor level of service many of my competitors do.)
I see this as a giant nightmare, and hope Froogle and products.yahoo.com never take off.
Why should prospects even bother to visit your website - with a tools like these, they don't have to.
For webmasters/ecommerce site owners, these are NOT products to get excited about!
Uh...no...not unless merchants want to compete solely on price.
When you boil it down, most do. We try to style our site for consumer trust and safety, ease of use and great info. At the end of the day though, it is our prices being low that makes the sale. If Froogle can rank us on price, and people stay for our quality I am all for it.
There might also be a possibility of removing much of the commercial interest spam from the main SERPS if the shopping public knew to use Froogle and Yahoo! Product search.
I mean I could low-ball all the prices on my site and wack on a HUGE shipping charge. After consumers experience this effect a few times they would stop using froogle.
Any comment G-GUY?
OK, I've learned from here that registering a domain name as a mirror to another one is kind of spammy and you have to be careful or redirects or get a duplicate content filter. So if it is a bad idea, why does [froogle.com...] redirect to [froogle.google.com?<...]Yeah - it should be a 301 redirect.
Still, showing the all-inclusive price, for your location would be useful.
The only way they could police such a system is to only use trusted XML feeds.
The fact that they have made these changes indicates that they have not abandoned the whole thing. I still wonder if they are planning on going live soon. Y! is going live this month with the half developed (IMHO) products.yahoo.com. The only reason I can think they would do this is to beat Google to the punch.
I mean I could low-ball all the prices on my site and wack on a HUGE shipping charge. After consumers experience this effect a few times they would stop using froogle.
Y! is going live this month with the half developed (IMHO) products.yahoo.com. The only reason I can think they would do this is to beat Google to the punch.[
OK, I've learned from here that registering a domain name as a mirror to another one is kind of spammy and you have to be careful or redirects or get a duplicate content filter. So if it is a bad idea, why does [froogle.com...] redirect to [froogle.google.com?<...]What do they care? They're not going to penalise themselves...
I agree with you in some respect. If the intention is to deceive the customer yes it will hurt the offending site. However, if this happens on a number of sites in froogle, then people will realize that froogle is useless.
With our main e-commerce site we charge shipping based on total weight, geographic location, business or residential address and level of service. So there is no way we provide an all-inclusive price. My largest competitors are in the same situation.
Now if you are selling DVD's for example and you are using the Postal service, then yes, an all-inclusive price would work.
To scale in terms of vendors/customers requires working with "trustworthy" vendors where you can ensure that they don't play shipping games with prices. You cannot grow the number of vendors if you don't check them out and Google will not be able to discriminate by kicking out vendors right and left w/o getting a very rough treatment from the webmasters at large...
This model is dead-end from day one. Google's strength was in taking a huge monster, meaning a multi billion page world wide web, in not trusting the data, assuming that spammers and SEOs will manipulate the algo, work hard at filtering that, and producing relevant results.
Pricewatch type sites can only be done well by niche players and even there I've never seen any really become a must visit site the way eBay and Amazon are and I don't think they ever will...
Froogle is a nice experiment belonging in Google Labs. It's a bit of bonus traffic for those that are on it, but it will never be a major site unless they change the concept. Yahoo shopping is a good model. Take money, offer an ecommerce site and then give your customer eyeballs. But even that probably wouldn't fit with the Google way of doing things.
It just isn't an adwords/adsense level market creating product.
Rather, I go to Froogle when I want to find any vendor selling a specific odd item that I need (or think I need). I appreciate being able to search by price, but when I get my list of results, I probably will not buy my new Elbonian widget or my gift box of licorice-flavored olive oil from the first vendor listed -- I will browse through the results, look at the vendors' websites, and find the offering that best fits my needs (often from a vendor that also sells something else I was thinking of buying -- to save on shipping, I'll buy several items at one time ;) ). Specialized vendors with listings in Froogle are going to get business from people like me.
Don't knock Froogle for being something it isn't. Appreciate it for what it is. :)
