Mpire to Unveil Power-Shopping Plug-In
Marshall Kirkpatrick
23 comments »
We’ve been getting “just in time for the holidays” pitches for coverage from quite a few shopping sites lately but Seattle based number crunchers Mpire have come out with one of the best new shopping products I’ve seen yet. The company’s site launched in June of this year. It compares prices on items for sale at a list of online retailers and tracks eBay auction prices for items over time. The graph acts (and looks) like Farecast airfare predictions, but for past auction price trends.
Today’s new Mpire product is a browser plug-in that pops up when looking at an item on any of several hundreds of 3rd party shopping sites and provides you cross-retailer data, related deals and coupons around the web and a fetching graph of eBay final auction sale prices rising or falling for your item over time. The screen shot following this post is fuzzy and small, click on it to open a full sized version in a new window. The plug-in, which will be available later this afternoon, is for Firefox only right now. Hopefully they will be able to offer an IE version as well. Update: It’s available now.
A browser plug-in may be the missing ingredient to drive substantial use of this very interesting product; a destination site was far more inconvenient to use. Beside the full display on the bottom of your screen, the plug-in also displays new and used prices for an item on supported sites right next to the site’s native price display. Damon Darlin of the New York Times was disappointed in Mpire’s search results in an article last week; good search is part of the challenge but making a comparison shopping tool easy and compelling to use is a huge challenge as well. I think Mpire has done a very nice job of that.
It doesn’t look like Mpire has a link up to this yet, but I found this page:
http://www.mpire.com/corporate/plugin.html
and downloaded the plugin from it and everything seems to work. Nice!
Looks like it’s on the main site now. This should be fun to play with heading into “Cyber Monday”
This site is awesome for quick checks of the going rate for gear. I look at a site, and can see what the price is elsewhere online. Tasty!
My brother has been using it as well for macbook laptop prices (hopefully for x-mas!)
Too bad, the plugin doesn’t work for anything older than FF 2.0
“Mpire says it has analyzed 61 trillion historical online sales so far.”
61 trillion online sales? Come on guys, do some fact checking. That is a ridiculous amount of data. There haven’t even been that many online transactions ever. Every one of the 6.5 billion people on Earth would have to make over 9k sales to add up to 61 trillion. Ha!
Lol, Jon - you know that was probably a joke that I was too busy looking at the browser plug in to laugh at.
I just visited the site and they even underline trillion… I’d ask these guys what’s up. That would easily be the biggest database in the world. I did some searching about big databases and there is nothing anywhere close with that number of records. Sprint appears to have one of the biggest (according to an HP press release), with 2.847 trillion rows. There are probably some government DBs that rival the size, but these guys claim to have 21x the number. And they are pretty much unheard of (TechCrunch has 18x the results on Google as Mpire).
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/.....0-121.html
Yes, the number of historical sales analyzed is completely made up.
James Howard is with Mpire, if you didn’t catch that btw.
It’s really lame to make up data and promote it prominently on your homepage, but thanks for the clarification. It just makes it look like Mpire is full of crap. Not a great first impression. If you lie in the first 100 pixels of the site, why should I even check out the rest?
So far my results were really pitiful. I want to buy a new or used unlocked Audiovox SMT 5600 Smartphone. I do a search on SMT5600 and get about 13 results - one phone. Do it on SMT 5600 and about the same. Most of the results are batteries, accessories and things like SD cards. I would say they have some work to do on these results and ebayers and others gaming the system and putting in models of 500 phones or pdas or computers or mp3 players etc. to sell something remotely related is going to make this a problem for well forever.
Very nice. I like the eBay integration idea.
Hey this is Dave from Mpire. First, thanks for the great feedback on Mpire Plugin. On the number, we’re having a little fun Here’s the detail…the number is a based on the number of consumers searching our catalog against how many historical records we’ve examined since we’ve launched. Yes it’s marketing. If you look in our search results, you’ll notice we employ a small army of Gnomes as well!
However, we do take our analytics seriously. The most important number is that Mpire is analyzing millions of product records every month to give consumers what we think is the most accurate picture of what real consumers should pay for things online. Don’t shoot the marketing department; they throw great parties (me)!
^^ Yeah, what Dave said.
Jon, Brad, I wouldn’t let the “historical sales analyzed” thing or one bad search result sour you on the entire product. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t get the right answers all the time, but I do think we get the right answers enough of the time to be worth your time. Compare mpire side by side against froogle, shopping.yahoo.com, the built in search within ebay, whatever you like. I certainly have and I think mpire stacks up favorably for a lot of stuff that people commonly search for.
You should also install the firefox extension and shop around on amazon or newegg or any of the sites it supports. I think you’ll find it surprisingly accurate. You don’t have to take my word for it (nor should you turn up your nose at it because of a number or a gnome on our website) — you can try it and decide for yourself.
Oops, I’ve got a little more to say …
As for the Audiovox SMT 5600 (neat phone, btw, i used to do a bit of hacking on those), we actually do pretty well on that. When I search for that on mpire under the new tab I see 4 items, one of which is the phone itself. Under the auction tab, I see 37 items, and on the front page most of those are the phone.
Put the exact same search into froogle and the front page of the results … not a single phone.
This looks very similar to a plug-in available at http://www.smartshopper.com. It’ll be interesting to see who their partners are.
Hey,
Pity that this is only available for ebay.com, it doesn’t help you when trying to search on other eBay sites or try to find the best deal, (shipping and handling costs are not included) or search through the whole eBay to find the best deal.
Is the product matching based on product catalogs? How accurate will it be for no catalog products?
Also would be interesting to have the possibility to access the previously sold items, not only see their price.
Anyway, I believe is really interesting product, if it gets optimized. The concept is great.