Since the days of Google's now renamed Froogle product search platform, which is now simply referred to as Google Products, I have made habit of dutifully exporting product data to product search websites through the use of CSV, RSS or through an API. This method of extending the e-commerce shopping cart's reach and the retail business brand has proven quite profitable. And to think that other than the cost of manual export or syndication configuration, such product syndication services are predominantly free or charge. But what about the your copyright?
This morning, I was performing some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for an e-commerce shopping cart and began drifting down the inbound link list. Further down the list of links, I landed upon TheFind, which was piping in a decent amount of traffic for GPR Steering Stabilizers. Now this is an interesting product search platform - perhaps one of the best. I was alerted to it a while back when I was asked by an enraged client why their products were listed upon TheFind's product pages.
My immediate response was to defuse the tone of the conversation by defining TheFind as a similar platform to Google Product Search, which it is. But as I began to actually navigate this morning, upon realizing the e-commerce site was earning just over a 100 inbound links over the last 15 days, I had a few different thoughts, which led me to look upon the site through the eyes of an old school daily newspaper editor, which I once was. When I first began my career in newspaper, the web was unheard of, digital cameras did not exist and anyone republishing content from the confines of the 16 pica gutter widths were simply infringing upon copyright.
The reason I immediately landed upon this notion was the fact that I was unable to navigate the pages using the Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)) web browser. While I didn't bother testing the site on Internet Explorer, since I despise the platform, I did test upon Opera and several other web browsers. The website was functional on each of those less-popular browsers, but it didn't work on the second-most popular web browser, Firefox, which led me to thinking with the old school mentality that is akin to pre-web publishers.
While allowing your product database to be exploited upon the World Wide Web is undeniably profitable for dealer sales, under such situations, the relationship is definitely not mutually profitable and could be cause for question, and if an e-commerce dealer was particularly self-righteous and loaded with the resources to launch a lawsuit, the scenario would make for yet another interesting dual for the publishing industry and retail industry alike.
The way I see it, TheFind needs to fix the situation with FireFox immediately - no threats vollied.
From an initial glance, TheFind truly lives up to its moto, "Every Store. Every Product. All At Once." It is fast, slick and intuitive. And while you may elect to login, using your email address as your username, it is not required to enlist the sites functionality to your shopping spree's advantage. Amid the most favored aspects of site functionality for thrifty shoppers is the store's coupon link, which is linked to each product. On the dealer end, branding is optimized through logo and the available contextual links and information that arrives through the popup, which includes a formidable amount of store details, including Twitter, Facebook and newsletter graphical-contextual links.
After reviewing a multitude of powersports stores listed on TheFind, I noticed a few of the big outlets, such as Bike Bandit, but also noticed a few budget sites, who had a considerable amount of product upon TheFind. For many of them, which will go unnamed, TheFind was a boost for their credibility, since navigating onto their websites made a purchase a questionable internet security endeavor, since the sites by no means looked professional developed and appeared to be graphically dated to the late 90s. For them, any leads to their site were leads they would have never had to begin with, since SEO was most certainly lacking upon the few I landed upon. The good thing for these apparently non-tech savvy website owners is that TheFind performs the product exports for them, importing the product data automatically, which is unlike Google Products.
But finally, in my opinion, while TheFind looks great and in spite of its Firefox issues, it is not as simple, intuitive or as functional as Google Products or perhaps even as Yahoo Shopping. I may be more apt to reconsider once the project matures and most certainly after it fixes the Firefox glitches.