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Building a comparison shopping cooperative. Any takers?
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I've looking for comparison shopping sites that offered product listing for FREE. No surprise, I didn't find much. Only Froogle, which is also Googlebase.com, but they don't permit drop-shippers (dropshipping is a process where the ecommerce shop doesn't hold any inventory but has an arrangement with warehouses so that products can be shipped directly to customers upon request). I've since been wondering if there are shopping comparison site coops on the web. In the traditional sense, a coop was where people bartered one thing in return for another. These were very popular in the 1970's in the US. Typically, this meant that you donated time in return for membership or further price discounts. Most coops were focused on
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groceries, but there were others as well. I have been thinking about if the same is possible in the ecommerce world. This is probably not something that would appeal to the deep pockets associated with the very large retailers. They seem quite satisfied with their large advertising budgets. However, the thousands of smaller single-person or family-run ecommerce sites and eshops might have an interest in this type of arrangement as they don't have large advertising budgets.
But how would a cooperative shopping comparison site work? For such a venture to be successful it would have to be based on a sound strategy. I'm suggesting the very same model that made the neighborhood co-op work in the 70's could work for e-commerce, but in slightly different terms.
Specifically, the shopping comparison coop site needs traffic so that it can produce leads for the members. To gain readers / hits / traffic they need a high ranking in the search engines and to spend some money on advertising. The ma-and-pop ecommerce store needs referrals of people looking for their product who otherwise would not find them. So how do we bring these two together in a mutually-beneficial arrangement?
The 1970's coop model, the currency was essentially time. People volunteered their time in return for privileges. In today's web environment, the current could be referral links. Anyone who's done any research on search engine optimization (SEO) knows that a key factor in your rating is how many other sites (particularly highly rated sites) link to you.
So there you have the answer. The sites that wish to become part of the shopping comparison coop pay with a link to the coop site rather than the usual pay-per-click model. In return, the shopping coop site gains visibility through higher rankings under the assumption that as more people join the coop the more hits they will get. In return, the member site gets referrals from the coop site. if you wanted to take the model a step higher, the algorithms for referrals could be based on the ranking of the member site. But I think for starters, just providing an in-bound link should be the cost of admission. The coop site would have to agree to do some modest advertising, which they could help fund through some tasteful advertising on their own site. Additionally, they would need the basic functionality for product input and listing and probably a bulk upload tool.
Has this been done? Is this a good idea? Let me know if you have thoughts or are interested in this idea.
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