Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

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What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me.

>What kind of service would one have to create that grabs prices but can charge consumers so it's not depending on affiliate vig?

I've got a handful of ideas about this and have been considering a startup along these lines. I think that you need to take control of the actual purchase, so then it's just "Oh, I paid less than I expected, some may have gone to the middleman but I still win" instead of "I paid money to X for the purchase and to Y for finding it for me" and feel somehow losing out for not finding it yourself. If anyone wants to discuss this I added an email to my profile.

This is kind of like what Jet was doing when they first launched, although they've stopped it since, apparently because stores didn't like it.

> What's wrong with Google shopping? I've found deals using it, it's had greater than zero value for me.

The Google shopping that exists today is not the same service that was originally launched. It used to function more like a standard search, but limited to all online stores. So long as there wasn't a robots.txt, Google was index the site and include the product in their shopping results. So basically like standard search, but with logic to determine if a site represented a store.

Then Google modified shopping so that it was opt-in for the retailers, meaning a large number of stores were no longer included. To be included in Google shopping now a retailer must have a Google merchant/adwords account. It's more of a curated search now.

Nothing wrong with it now, but it used to be great for finding hard-to-find items or items that were mispriced by less sophisticated retailers.

I know that they moved to paid inclusion, but as I said, it's still useful. GP said it was "killed", and that seemed too much.

Killed from it's original vision; the remaining is a shadow of what it was. Big shadow, admittedly. But fair point, my hyperbole may have gotten out of control.

Google Shopping requires vendors to pay for inclusion so it isn't a fair comparison of what's actually available. What makes matters worse is that they don't make that clear so people think it's fairer than it is.

Typically though most retailers are on there. Granted the current incarnation is much better for retailers in that it doesn't always make the cheapest price clear.

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