o’neill media

A new comparison shopping site TheFind.com launched today as an all-encompassing shopping search site. The Company has garnered a bit of buzz, with an interesting write-up at GigaOm and Comparison Engines. Although I like the principle, it’s really been done already, and with better technology (see ShopWiki). The real question here is, do consumers really care. If I search for a PSP on a couple sites, shopzilla, the lowest price I was able to get was $130 (15 results), shopping.com it was $115 (24 results) and on TheFind there were 10,427 results from 98 stores. I noticed one deal for “Sony PSP - System - Value Pack” from Shop4Tech (but when you go to the actual site the item was sold out).

But the real value these comparison services provide is that they have actual people indexing these products together. Is a Sony PSP - System - Value Pack a Sony PSP or some add-ons that come with a PSP? Being relevant in comparison shopping is more than crawling a bunch of sites and handing users useless information. The value-add for comaprison shopping engines is the data matching they have done and the attribute filtering they allow on their categories. Here’s a comparison of mp3 Players attribute filtering from TheFind and PriceGrabber.

Obviously there is a big difference here. When a user is actually trying to make a decision on which MP3 Player is right for them, TheFind.com just won’t cut it. I do see this service useful for someone who is doing meta-comparison shopping that wants to save an extra $2 on toner cartridges, but these people will check Bizrate, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber and TheFind anyway because they are that cheap. The only difference is that Bizrate and Shopping.com are all getting paid for their services, while TheFind is giving away the service for free.