Yahoo Hopes Its New Service
Turns Searchers Into Shoppers
Yahoo Inc. wants to shake up shopping.
The Internet company is revamping its online shopping services to make it easier for users to find merchandise such as electronics, baby goods and music CDs. Starting Tuesday it plans to add tools to help Internet surfers make better side-by-side comparisons by criteria such as brand, price, features and consumer ratings of merchants.
Online comparison shopping is hardly a new idea, and Yahoo already offers some comparison features. But the Web giant's stepped-up focus could affect smaller e-commerce players and even the strategies of big online merchants such as Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. Yahoo plans to add similar improvements to other content areas of its network, such as movies, music, travel and autos.
The landscape of comparison-shopping services, including DealTime.com, mySimon, BizRate, and PriceGrabber, is highly fragmented -- so much so that Web-search giant Google Inc. caused an industrywide buzz last year when it unveiled just a test version of a shopping site dubbed Froogle.
Yahoo's move is another example of Chief Executive Terry Semel's campaign to use improved search technology to generate additional revenue. By providing better tools for users, it hopes to deliver more likely buyers to merchants and advertisers, allowing it to charge more for Web ads and referrals.
Yahoo also is making a subtle change in its business model for shopping, which may affect both the company's fortunes and the comprehensiveness of the service. While Yahoo now mainly gets shopping revenue from commissions on sales that originated on its site, the company plans to start charging merchants to guarantee inclusion in its new shopping search engine. Yahoo says it won't identify in the search results which merchants have paid such a fee.
The company says it still will be possible for merchants who don't pay for listings to have their products show up in comparisons. But there is no guarantee such information will be up to date, since these unpaid listings will reflect Yahoo's regular sweeps of information on the Web rather than data the paying merchants submit to the service. Yahoo said the paid inclusion program doesn't taint its product results because the items that show up in response to a consumer query are listed by relevance, not by order of which merchant paid to be included in the program.
Yahoo's large audience may make the new service seductive to online stores. Amazon, in fact, has decided to join the "paid inclusion" service, and is one of more than 100 big-name merchants Yahoo hopes to lure.
Rob Solomon, general manager of Yahoo Shopping, says the changes should bring Yahoo to parity with other shopping services, and surpass them, he hopes, in comprehensiveness and ease-of-use. He says that services like Amazon, BizRate and PriceGrabber offer good product-comparison features while Google's Froogle and eBay offer comprehensive product selections. He envisions Yahoo's new shopping area as offering both.
"We woke up to the fact that if we want to win in this space, search is the key," says Mr. Solomon.
For the new shopping service, Yahoo is implementing technology from its purchase of Inktomi Corp., which uses special mathematical formulas to return results to Web-search queries, similar to how Google works. Yahoo also plans to integrate more ads throughout its shopping sites that appear based on the search words users plug in (if you search for "dachshund" you many see a pet-store ad), thanks to its partnership with Overture Services Inc., which provides ads for which merchants pay for placement. (Yahoo agreed to acquire Overture earlier this year and the deal should close next month.)
Yahoo ranks as the third most-visited multicategory commerce sites behind eBay and Amazon.com, respectively, according to market research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. But the gap between No. 2 Amazon and Yahoo is significant: Amazon had 26.1 million visitors in August to Yahoo Shopping's 15.1 million. And specialty shopping site DealTime, which changed its name to Shopping.com Monday, wasn't far behind, with 11.9 million visitors.
Daniel Ciporin, chairman and chief executive of Shopping.com, plays down the threat of Yahoo's new comparison-shopping service. "I have an enormous amount of respect for Yahoo but they're in a lot of different areas," Mr. Ciporin says. "Focus matters in this business."
Safa Rashtchy , a U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray analyst, argues that smaller comparison shopping sites will be worried about Yahoo's renewed e-commerce focus. Froogle, for instance, offers a very basic search site, without the depth or breadth of comparison features that Yahoo will be introducing, he says. Yahoo's 200 million-plus visitors to all its sites makes shopping a more profitable business for it than a competitor like DealTime, because Yahoo doesn't have the customer-acquisition costs that DealTime has, he says.
Yahoo Shopping generates $2 million to $5 million in revenue a quarter, Mr. Rashtchy estimates. He forecasts it could rise to $50 million to $100 million in 2004.
The paid inclusion program features 37 categories, including apparel, flowers, gifts and jewelry. Under this program, merchants will pay the company from 15 cents to more than $1 when a visitor clicks on a link for that merchant.
Other comparison-shopping sites such as Shopping.com also use variations on this "click-through" business model. Nonpaying merchants are included in Shopping.com's data but they tend to be close to the bottom of those categories, the company says. BizRate, by contrast, charges click-through fees and also may take a commission on a completed transaction, a spokeswoman says.
Chuck Davis, the CEO of Bizrate, argues that his company will be a survivor, regardless of what Yahoo does, because of its consumer orientation and comprehensiveness -- it features 33,000 merchants and 10 million products, which will jump to 25 million next month, he said.
Yahoo's new strategy isn't without risk. Its product- search service might cannibalize some of the revenue that it gets from its core search service, Mr. Rashtchy warns. And the company's referral of visitors to other sites may be a disadvantage because once they leave Yahoo they may not come back during that surfing session.
Yet Yahoo already loses some potential customers: It says in federal filings that a large number of Web cruisers use its shopping services simply to gather information for purchases that they may later make in stores. It hopes the new product-comparison feature lets it generate more revenue from these users.
“货比三家”能否激发网上购物热？
雅虎公司(YAHOO INC.)要彻底变革人们的购物生活。
这家互联网公司正在改革其网络购物服务，使用户更容易找到各类商品，如电子产品、婴儿用品和音乐CD等。从本周开始，雅虎计划增加一些工具，帮助在网上购物的人根据品牌、价格、特征和用户对商家的评级等不同标准进行产品对比。
网上比较购物并不算什么新鲜事，雅虎本身也提供一些不同产品的对比服务，但雅虎现在要做的是强化这项服务。这不仅会影响到规模较小的电子商务运营商，甚至连亚马逊(Amazon.com Inc.)和eBay Inc.这样的大型电子商务运营商也可能不得不因此作出策略调整。另外，雅虎还打算在影视、音乐、旅游和汽车等其他部分也进行类似的服务改进。
目前提供比较购物服务的有DealTime.com、mySimon、BizRate和PriceGrabber，但它们极度分散。所以，去年互联网搜索引擎Google Inc.尝试推出购物网站Froogle时，引起了全行业不小的震动。
这一举动是雅虎首席执行长泰里?塞梅尔(Terry Semel)利用升级后的搜索技术来增加收入的又一新招。通过向用户提供更好的购物比较工具，雅虎希望为商家和广告方带去更多购物者，这样雅虎也可以收取更高的广告费和介绍费。
雅虎还对购物频道的经营模式略微做出调整，这将关系到网站未来的财源和所提供服务的综合性。雅虎购物频道目前的收入主要来源于通过雅虎网站卖出产品的销售佣金，而在新的购物搜索引擎投入使用后，商家要想使自己纳入该引擎，雅虎就打算开始向其收取额外费用。雅虎称，公司不会在搜索结果中显示哪些商家支付了这一费用。
但雅虎也表示，那些没有为此付费的商家也有可能出现在用户进行比较购物时搜索到的结果页面上，但雅虎无法保证其信息的及时性。只有付费商家的信息，才会作为数据及时进入雅虎的该项服务，而其他商业信息只是在雅虎按常规更新页面时才能得以反映。雅虎称，这项付费服务不会影响到搜索结果的公正性。所有根据用户请求查询出的搜索结果是根据相关程度高低排列，而不是谁付费就优先将谁的商品列出来。
雅虎庞大的访问量将使这项新服务对网络商家格外具有诱惑力。事实上，亚马逊已经决定使用这项服务，雅虎希望可以吸引到100多家像亚马逊这样的大客户。
雅虎购物频道总经理罗勃?所罗门(Rob Solomon)说，这一改进将使雅虎在服务的综合性和便利性方面赶上、甚至超过其他网站的购物服务。他说，亚马逊、BizRate和PriceGrabber的产品比较功能都很不错，Google的Froogle和eBay则提供的是全面的产品挑选服务。他说，新的雅虎购物频道将同时提供上述两种服务。
所罗门说，“我们已经意识到，要想赢得这个领域，强大的搜索功能是关键”。
雅虎为开展这项新购物服务而采用了收购Inktomi获得的技术，这项技术通过使用特殊的数学公式获取符合用户请求的搜索结果，类似于Google的搜索技术。雅虎还打算利用与Overture Services Inc.的合作，在购物频道中加入更多广告，而且这些广告会与用户输入的搜索关键字相关（比如为查询一种德国猎犬而输入关键字“dachshund”之后，在搜索结果页面上就会出现很多关于狗粮的广告）。雅虎今年早些时候同意收购Overture，预计全部工作将于下个月结束。
市场研究公司Nielsen/NetRatings称，雅虎仅次于eBay和亚马逊，是美国访问量排名第三的综合商务网站。但雅虎与亚马逊之间的差距很大：亚马逊8月份的访问量有2,610万人次；而雅虎购物频道只有1,510万人次。一些专业购物网站，如DealTime的访问量有1,190万人次，并不比雅虎差多少。DealTime昨天更名为Shopping.com。
Shopping.com董事长兼首席执行长丹尼尔?西波林(Daniel Ciporin)对雅虎新推出比较购物服务不以为然。“我非常喜欢雅虎，但它涉足的领域太多”，西波林说，“在这个领域专业是很重要的”。
U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray分析师萨法?拉施特奇(Safa Rashtchy)说，雅虎重新关注电子商务会令一些规模较小的比较购物网站感到担忧。以Froogle为例，这只是一个功能很简单的搜索网站，其产品比较功能的覆盖面远远不如雅虎即将推出的比较购物服务，他说，雅虎的用户数量超过2亿，不必像DealTime等网站那样还要为获取新用户付出成本，所以雅虎的购物频道应当比其竞争对手更容易赚钱。
拉施特奇估计，雅虎购物频道每个季度可创收200万至500万美元，到2004年有可能进一步增长至5,000万至1亿美元。
雅虎的比较购物服务覆盖包括衣饰、鲜花、礼物和珠宝在内的37类商品。根据付费方案，加入该服务的商家将为每次用户点击其在雅虎网站上的链接支付从15美分至至少1美元不等的费用。
但雅虎的新战略也并不是毫无风险。拉施特奇警告说，产品搜索服务可能会分流雅虎核心搜索服务的部分收入。另外，雅虎一旦将用户介绍到其他网站，他们以后可能就直接去那些网站而不会再到雅虎来了。
其实雅虎已经损失了一些潜在客户。公司在一份提交到联邦监管机构的文件中说，有大量访问者在雅虎搜索到今后可以去购物的网站后就不再回来了。公司希望新推出的比较购物服务能增加从这部分访问者身上获得的收入。
