The newly launched search site, Mpire, combines product comparisons across multiple sites with product analytics to aid consumer decisions.
Shoppers gain a more accurate picture of market prices with consumer analytics such as bid/price histories on products, and recommendations on optimal days and times to bid. In partnership with eBay, Craigslist, Yahoo, and Overstock, Mpire serves as a convenient access point for users to “search by price, seller, type of payment, location [or] how many bids there are on any given item.”
Former Expedia president Matt Hulett joins as CEO: “Think of it as the start of ‘Shopping 2.0’ ― search and analytics to help buyers make smarter and more informed decisions.” Mpire’s step toward transparency parallels Farecast, which Battelle wrote about earlier.
I am impressed with Mpire and will write a post on it for WebMetricsGuru.com
One area I can see Mpire’s potential already – Keyword Research – you can really go after the long tail when looking for….say…a “bluetooth headset” and get the popular terms for it (which you can then optimize for). Sure, you’d also popularity of the terms if you are the cell phone dealer BUT anyone can now judge the demand and go after the most indemand models for optimization.
I asked a question on our blog a few days back and am still wondering. If Oodle can’t crawl craigslist (and I think it should be able to), why can mPire? They no longer have the craigslist logo up on their homepage, but maybe that’s a coincidence.
My name is Dave and I’m a co-founder along with Greg Harrison of Mpire. Thanks for the post.
On the crawling front, we’re doing what we call Flash Crawling, which is a little different that your traditional crawling, but necessary for providing real-time display of items that have an end time.
When a user initiates a search through Mpire, we pass the request through to the appropriate site and crawl the return results in real-time. This has a few big benefits: 1)we get real-time feedback which is critical for products that are time sensitive 2) we don’t have to write crawlers that pound our partner sites walking through their data and utilizing resources; they’re serving us results just as they would a user.
As for Craigslist, we spent a lot of time talking with users about the best way to implement Craigslist classifieds and we decided that providing a drop down list to make the search for Craigslist a little easier was the place to start. People preferred to see the listings in a separate window since they felt those items were structurally different that a listing from eBay, Yahoo, or Overstock. This may change overtime as we ad more marketplaces. The only reason we removed the logo was to increase awareness that we have research services that benefit online sellers! Not because of a smackdown from them:)
Thanks for the feedback!