LetsBuyIt Blog

After having previously reported (blog post here) about Telebid we now read in the FAZ that apparently Telebid has not only expanded to the UK and Spain but is also planning to open up in the US, Korea, Japan and China and currently has a daily subscription rate of 3,000 new members per day! We had also discussed the business model previously in the blog and we know now that apparently Telebid is making a daily turnover of almost 30 000 to 35 000 Euros per day, according to FAZ!!! Judge for yourself.

Concerning the recent eBay sale of Yieeha, a Social Community Shopping Portal, the new owner has been made know now on their blog and is the Net-Line Onlinedienste GmbH from Heilbronn. After quickly checking out their website the company turns out to be a live-erotic-cam provider, which gives the Yieeha slogan “Social winning” quite a new twist! It is good to know the user info in safe hands.

For e-commercants it is frustrating to know that people have gone into the new age of comparing products and services “online” and navigate like experts through special offers and shops however when it comes to the actual purchase the majority still prefer to purchase the item in a real shop.

Conservative or natural?

I think that this is very natural and it is time for the e-commerce sites, portals and shops alike, to unite the two worlds better and that goes beyond having a print-ready format of the product on the site. The idea seems old-school that shoppers then need to go into the shop and hand over the printed product sheet as price proof to bargain. Perhaps we all want the product information on the phone in the form of a SMS, blackberry message, note, and I don’t know what?

There is a lot of room for improvement and Mediaplex, part of the Valueclick group, are attempting in understanding better this “online-offline” relationship by having customer-card related tracking services but is this all there can be?

Are European merchants ready to be confronted with the transparency of comparative search engines to match prices, like in Australia where many shops guarantee to beat advertised prices from competitors? Have Europeans finally travelled enough to become open to the idea of bargaining as much as they do on their holidays (many occidentals claim to be bargaining experts when on holiday but why don’t they do it at home?)

I have spent some years in countries where bargaining is part of the culture and everyday life and I think that the momentum of the mass to bargain has not been outsourced to its limit. Why can’t we mobilize the mass to reset the prices? Flashmob and MediaMarkt give you an idea of where my thoughts are headed.

Google has changed the name of its product search service from Froogle to Google Product Search. The company also simplified the Product Search user interface to be more consistent with the one on the main Google search page. Google launched Froogle in 2002, but removed the link to it from its home page last year.

“Froogle offers a lot of great functionality and has helped many users find things to buy over the years, but the name caused confusion for some because it doesn’t clearly describe what the product does,” wrote Marissa Mayer, Google vice president for search and user experience, and Jeff Bartelma, product manager for Google Product Search, on the company’s official blog.