eBay Acquires Shopping.com
Auction king eBay has announced it's plans to acquire one of the Internet's largest and more popular shopping engines, Shopping.com, in what is said to be a $620 million transaction. The acquisition, announced Wednesday, brings the Web's biggest comparison shopping engine under the hood of the largest auction website at a time when eBay has been struggling, to say the least, in its efforts to maintain its growth.
Similar to Yahoo! and Google, Shopping.com makes its money from advertisements that appear adjacent to related search results. But unlike rivals, its sole specialty is in listing prices of commercial goods sold across the web. The acquisition puts eBay in close competition with the commercial engines of search giants Yahoo! and Google and is also a sure sign of eBay's financial interest in the booming search-engine marketing business, which is expected to be worth more than $5 billion this year. With Shopping.com under its belt, eBay will own a major avenue to funnel traffic back to its online mall, along with the ability to strengthen its fee revenue with advertising dollars.
In my opinion, if this acquisition were to go through and eBay indeed purchases Shopping.com than we could easily be seeing the next competitor to enter the on going battle for search. Don't get me wrong, its not like Shopping.com isn't currently a threat for the major search engines, but adding eBay into the equation as a tag-team partner... now you've truly got a force to be reckoned with.
Similar to Yahoo! and Google, Shopping.com makes its money from advertisements that appear adjacent to related search results. But unlike rivals, its sole specialty is in listing prices of commercial goods sold across the web. The acquisition puts eBay in close competition with the commercial engines of search giants Yahoo! and Google and is also a sure sign of eBay's financial interest in the booming search-engine marketing business, which is expected to be worth more than $5 billion this year. With Shopping.com under its belt, eBay will own a major avenue to funnel traffic back to its online mall, along with the ability to strengthen its fee revenue with advertising dollars.
In my opinion, if this acquisition were to go through and eBay indeed purchases Shopping.com than we could easily be seeing the next competitor to enter the on going battle for search. Don't get me wrong, its not like Shopping.com isn't currently a threat for the major search engines, but adding eBay into the equation as a tag-team partner... now you've truly got a force to be reckoned with.
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posted by Karl Ribas Friday, June 03, 2005 Read Comments (0) | Post a Comment | Subscribe  
 
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