3i has invested €2.6 million in shopping search engine Twenga. Similar to other shopping search startups, Twenga is a meta search engine for products from online merchants. Twenga’s search results include user reviews and images on top of the usual price comparisons.
There are a ton of shopping product search engines out there right now. It’s a crowded space and to distinguish themselves companies have been focusing on advanced features such as deep product feature search (Retrevo) or price trend tracking (Mpire) to stand out. There’s The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight, Ugenie, and many more. Google had it’s own notable stumble in online product search as well.
Of the engines, Twenga is most like “The Find”. Search results are returned as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. This allows the engine to run more complex searches properties such as a 10% price drop. It also focuses on Europe and comes translated in an impressive six different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English). The network reached 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants
With so much choice, there’s no excuse to not get the lowest price on your Christmas gifts.
Impressive one and interesting way to display results. But don’t you think that being a product search engine, they should list the results from different sources (like eBay etc?)
-sinha
http://www.pluggd.in
wow, that’s 2.6M they’ll see again!
No one successful like amazon the way they promote product and generate authentic reviews.
Alas, this looks a little promising, I remembered doing a sponsored post for twenga some time ago.. and got a sneak peak at what they are up to..
I wonder how far this site will go?
This site shows a lot of promise. I’d be interested in talking with them.
http://www.whatshottoday.com
Keeping my eye on this one!
“There’s The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight, Ugenie…”
Yeah, there *is* this collection of *adorable* little companies. Your passing mention of Froogle sort of hints that there are no incumbents in the space.
Check these out, yo:
shopping.com
yahoo shopping
pricegrabber
cnet
nextag
shopzilla
How do they do it? I cannot submit my webshop directly to them.
A dozen coder creates regexp-s for each shop or shop type? Interesting…
I can’t get my products listed with them - what the secret?
I’ve been using a somewhat similar yet different app from the US that has been of tremendous help for me while shopping for gifts this Christmas.
http://www.buzzoop.com/
@ Michael. There are simply so many out there. The list could fill up a whole paragraph. I opted for “and many more”
Gee…
Twenga used DBSight!!!
Someone should buy DBSight!
http://wiki.dbsight.com/index......by_DBSight
Chris Lu
I think in the future we’ll see more exciting product search engines - something like Giftoscope (www.giftoscope.com), but product search oriented with using users rates.
Search for best prices only is boring.
I want to type “mp3 player” and moving on several measurements like “more stylish” or “more reliable” or “cheaper” e.t.c.
Umm, I don;t see anything new or innovative about this company. It is no different than Kelkoo, or any of the other comparison search engines out there. I cannot believe that 3i invested in this company, especially given that sites like these can only succeed ultimately if they can garner traffic, which comes only in 3 ways:
1) Free traffic via direct hits
2) Free traffic via SEO traffic
3) SEM (Purchased traffic)
For #1 to work, they need to be able to get people to come directly to their site (bookmark them, sign up to a mailing list, RSS feeds of deals, general top of mind awareness). With so many shopping sites out there, this is not easy to do. Very few sites (and even fewer shopping sites) get this kind of loyal and recurring traffic (Amazon & EBay have this market sewn up in the commerce space).
For #2 to work, you need great SEO guys & gals to “spam” search engines, or you need phenomenal content…hmm, with so many shopping search engines out there, Search engines like Yahoo! & Google continually update algorithms to clean out spam from companies like Twenga. And, Twenga will not be able to get great content because to be fair, they are late to the game - who will write the reviews, and more importantly; WHY?? Amazon again has a massive lead in this area
#3 is expensive and the keywords Twenga will bid on are the same ones every other shopping site will want, so its a tough tough game to buy these keywords profitably.
In summary, this is not only a poor investment, but it is a company that will be irrelevant shortly - the kind that just stays alive, but is better off never having wasted investors’ money