The players:

eBay

Largest online auction site where buyers bid to buy products. Arguably most well-known e-commerce site with over 100 million registered users. Billions in sales are transacted here worldwide.

Shopping.com

Shopping portal that helps shoppers find least-expensive merchant to buy their desired product from. Shopping.com is one of largest shopping portals on Internet. They achieved success by implementing a model that allows online merchants to acquire targeted clicks from shoppers by paying a per-click fee.

eBay Sellers

Individuals, small businesses, and some larger businesses post products for auction on eBay, and also maintain “stores” within eBay website where shoppers can make purchases without bidding. eBay sellers must maintain a presence on eBay to participate. This means that shopper never leaves eBay to make a purchase, and sellers must coordinate a system to process orders through eBay.

Online Merchants

Internet stores, large and small. Stores ranging from independent specialty stores like Surray Luggage, to huge mass-merchants like Amazon.com. Many online merchants do not do business on eBay because it requires them to maintain a separate store, which has both branding and logistical consequences.

What’s happening?

eBay is buying Shopping.com for $620 million. Shopping.com’s key assets include its product comparison technology, large network of product reviewers (formally EPinions.com), brand awareness, and of course, its advertisers.

Background

eBay was originally founded as an online auction where individuals offered used (and sometimes new) products to highest bidder. Over time, EBay has introduced services to allow merchants to sell directly to buyers through eBay stores that bypass bidding process. Since everything is done through eBay, merchants are required to have a presence on eBay that is separate from their online store. In other words, merchant must have two stores: Their current store, and their eBay store.

Analysis

This could go one of two ways:

1) eBay could be buying Shopping.com to monetize its targeted traffic by sending eBay shoppers outside of EBay to Shopping.com portal. In other words, they will funnel traffic from eBay to Shopping.com, which will then be funneled to online merchants who currently advertise on Shopping.com.

Load Times – Are You Driving A Ferrari or Moped?

Give some thought to sites you have visited of past few weeks. Were you willing to wait 20 seconds for a site to load or did you hit back button? Why would visitors to your site behave any differently? They won’t.

Webmasters, designers and site owners universally access web through high-speed connections. Because of this, it is easy to forget roughly 45% of surfers use dial-up connections. While your site may appear to load quickly on your high-speed connection, have you tried loading it on a 56k connection? The results can be shocking.

Sites that appear to load quickly on a high-speed connection can take forever on 56k. It is not unheard of to find a “fast site” actually takes 30, 50 or 80 seconds to load on a 56k. Sometimes, load time is so slow browser will actually “time out” and fail to show anything. If your site has this problem, 45% of hits are worthless. Worse, those frustrated surfers are unlikely to try to access your site in future even if you fix speed problems.

How fast should a page load on a 56k connection? As fast as possible, but no slower then 25 seconds. If you can get 56k load times below 10 seconds, you can turn a negative into a competitive advantage. Surfers come back to fast sites.

Determining Load Times