Friday's banter: RoboShopper no RoboCop for e-commerce

Every Friday, you hopefully will be happy to find a read that is a bit let serious than the others I post for that week.  This entry may be commentary on an anecdote from a merchant, something in the marketplace I found rather curious, or just general banter to which I encourage all of you comment.

For this Friday, I came across a site called RoboShopper.  Needless to say, I think the founders have a affection for the “Robo Cop” series just from the name and that alone intrigued me to found out more.  So here is what I found.

I went to www.RoboShopper.com and found out that they are part of www.OneSeek.com, or should I say that they guide you back to them as much as possible. OneSeek is a good directory of services and products on the internet and RoboShopper is an extension of this directory service for shopping destination sites.

Anyway, back to RoboShopper…so I typed in golf shoes as they gave me the option to compative shop online.  Just so you all know, I used to play professional golf a long, long time ago so I generally like to start product searches for golf related items to see how CSEs and shopping destination sites work and generally all CSEs have golf related products.  Here is a summary of what I liked:

1. The site brought up over 500 golf shoes listings, not bad
2. I could search by brand and zip code, okay fair enough
3. Drop down menu of 12 CSEs from where they pull “golf shoes”, okay not a bad feature

But wait….when I actually looked at where I was clicking through under the URL all RoboShopper did was redirect me to one of the 12 CSEs they also have listed from on the drop down menu.  Am I missing something?  What value does that add?   

From what I can see all they do is show you what CSEs are out there and redirect them to you. And they only list 12, MerchantAdvantage feeds to over 90, what happened to the others?  And, do I really need a directory of where I can online shop?  If you want to find that out just type in “comparison shopping and all” in Google and you will have your answer.

Anyway, now to functionality of the site….I chose “golf shoes” to find out how it stacks up on price and reviews across several CSE sites.  Voila…nothing.  They just redirected me to a CSE and the reviews that that CSE had or did not have. And the value of this is?

May I suggest to RoboShopper that they might have something very valuable if they redirected people to an aggregated listing of all “golf shoes” pulled from all the CSEs, with whom they get their data, and show us how those listings stack up against each other on price and reviews.

Oh, as for reviews, RoboShopper uses www.ratings.net and when you go there the reviews are not plentiful.  I am unsure what to say other than the proliferation of e-commerce sites like these, whether badly executed or not, does show that business folks realize that there is money to be made…as for www.OneSeek.com and www.RoboShopper.com and www.Ratings.net , even though they have been around since 1997, they are not there yet.

Am I missing something?

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. Be careful about working with companies who say that they will help you.  There are a lot them popping up that add little value and take time away from doing important things.

2. The proliferation of many “services and companies” that are working in the e-commerce world is growing, which leads me to believe that figuring out a good e-commerce strategy is essential increasing your online revunes.

3. Ed D. Tail is not a highly humorous fellow…although he tries! LOL