Monday Morning Roundup

The NY Times (reg req’d) has a profile of/interview with Steve Berkowitz, who went from CEO of Ask to running Microsoft’s Internet arm. This is exactly the same article — in one way of looking at it — that was written about Yahoo!, which initiated a string of bad PR. Virtual Earth 3-D gets slammed a bit in the piece as being something of a distraction from core search. I like it and thing it has long-term value for the company. It just needs to operate faster online.

Helio adds mobile social networking features (per MediaPost, reg req’d), which will “dovetail” with local.

A couple of things I neglected to cover last week:

• Local.com added a holiday shopping guide. It’s not particularly local but valuable for shoppers and Local.com users and raises the question of what I like to call “the product definition.”
• In a conceptually related way, Yell.com added enhanced mapping capabilities to its site and launched an entertainment vertical called Yell Food and Drink. Canda’s YPG directory has a number of verticals and in the US, RH Donnelley has made some tentative moves in that direction.

Gary Price points out Windows Live’s new local HotSpot locator.

The WSJ over the weekend had a piece (sub req’d) on four media companies contemplating creating a YouTube competitor:

Four major media companies, including News Corp.’s Fox, Viacom Inc., CBS Corp. and General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, are in talks about creating a video Web site to compete with Google Inc.’s YouTube, according to people close to the situation.

The companies, owners of most of the major TV networks, envision a jointly owned site that would be the primary Web source for video content from their networks, allowing them to cash in on fast-growing Web video advertising. They also have discussed building a Web video player that could play video clips from across the Web. A deal to create a competitor remains far off, however.

Walt Disney Co., owner of ABC, isn’t participating in the talks, because it wants to rely on the strength of its own brands, according to a person close to the discussions. ABC and the networks participating in the talks already offer some of their programming on their own Web sites.

LostRemote reports on local news weather forecasts showing up on Google video for the largest US metro markets.

Here’s an interesting NY Times article (reg req’d) on how publishers manipulate traffic numbers with pop-ups.

ClearChannel beefs up ClearChannel online, including with local ads and content.

Spot Runner has formed an alliance with the Diamond Promotion Service “to provide diamond jewelry retailers and manufacturers with cost-effective and targeted local TV advertising.  The ads complement DPS’ national ‘A Diamond Is Forever’ marketing initiatives and are designed to help jewelry retailers and manufacturers promote their businesses.”

Properazzi.com (something of a pun) launches a pan-European real-estate search site with over a million listings.

Attack of the Holiday Shopping Surveys

It seems like every couple of days now someone is putting out a holiday shopping-related survey. This is a logical PR move in anticipation of what will undoubtedly be a heavy season for e-commerce. After receiving the fourth or fifth one, I finally decided I needed to round them up (forgive me if I missed one).

Yahoo:

Three out of four (76 percent) holiday shoppers said they plan to shop for holiday gifts online, and a similar number, 75 percent, said they are likely to purchase gifts online from small businesses, according to a new survey commissioned by Yahoo! Small Business and conducted by Harris Interactive. Survey respondents expressed strong support for e-commerce with small businesses that offer a secure payment system, easy customer checkout and free shipping.

Nearly a third of holiday shoppers (30 percent) said that they would do half or more of their holiday shopping online, and nearly two thirds (63 percent) said online specialty, ‘niche,’ or boutique retailers are one of the “best places” to shop for unusual or hard-to-find gifts.

Google:

According to a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Google Checkout, 40% of employed U.S. adults say they’ll be doing at least some of their online holiday shopping from work this year, with 1 in 4 of those shoppers logging on to track down that perfect gift on Monday, November 27. (57% plan to shop during coffee and lunch breaks, while 34% will wait until the end of the workday.)

Google is promoting Checkout to both consumers and merchants. Here’s the new consumer entry point (going live Monday after American turkey day)

Advertising.com:

Hosted by online market research company InsightExpress, the survey assessed consumer holiday shopping behaviors and expectations for 2006 from 500 survey respondents.

Survey data indicate that 2006 will be another strong season for online retailers. Well over half of the survey respondents plan to spend as much or more than they spent online during the 2005 holiday season. They also plan to go online early, with nearly a third of all respondents planning to begin their online shopping before Thanksgiving.

Consumers were also asked to indicate why they go online during the holiday season. They identified generating gift ideas, comparing product features and prices, and the convenience of shopping from home as the three most compelling reasons for shopping online.

The data also indicate, however, that holiday shoppers don’t always purchase online immediately – researching products for up to a month before buying a product. In addition, after researching products online, 60 percent of respondents still prefer to buy offline.

Become.com (based largely on Jupiter data):

• 68% of consumers say free shipping is the most important cost savings incentive to shop online (per third-party research commissioned by Become.com).
• 40% of consumers are reluctant to shop online due to shipping costs.
• 37% of online holiday purchases will be made after the ground-shipping deadline (according to Jupiter Research).
• In all, online holiday retail sales will grow to $32 billion in 2006 - up 18% over last year.

So what conclusions can we draw from all this? Basically:

• People will do as much or more online shopping as they did last year
• Some significant percentage of that will happen at work (posing challenges re capturing conversions when people are at work and then transact later at home)
• People love free shipping
• People research products online but still largely convert offline (the Advertising.com numbers were based on an online survey and underestimate the audience doing online research but converting offline)

By contrast, according to MORI Research (2006 for the NAA, n=4020), 90% of US adults buy offline and 7% buy online, but 66% use the Internet for shopping-related research. And once again, e-commerce is about 2.7% of overall US retail. But the Internet continues to influence more and more of those offline transactions.

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Related: In today’s MediaPost (reg req’d), Shanka Gupta discusses two more holiday shopping surveys: one by AOL and another released earlier in the week (the one I missed above) by DoubleClick.

 

Limitations of the Google Culture

Some time ago I wrote a blog post, “Google’s Social Awkwardness,” about how how Google had neglected to sufficiently invest in “social media” or anticipate its rise and was blindsided by the popularity of MySpace. Then there was the Rupert Murdoch statement that Google could’ve bought MySpace for half of what he paid but passed. I’m speculating when I say that the company’s bias toward “build” vs. “buy” was the culprit there. Although, arguably that’s changed in the process leading up to the YouTube acquisition.

Then there’s the “Darwinian” environment in which Google develops and launches products, doesn’t market them and effectively throws them on the virtual refrigerator to see what sticks. This is the legacy of Google’s no-marketing rise in the world of search and it has colored all their product launches. The company wants to see what works and what users adopt via WOM/viral marketing.

In that larger context I previously argued that it was important for Google to depart from that philosophy and strongly promote Checkout, both to consumers and to marketers. The company has done some limited banner buying around the value proposition for merchants. But now, the WSJ reports, Checkout is going free to merchants for the holidays (read: as an incentive to adopt). Henry Blodget (remember him?) argues that this policy reflects that Google Checkout has so far been unsuccessful in gaining merchant adoption.

It’s quite possible that even with heavy consumer and merchant marketing Google Checkout might still be lagging in merchant adoption rates (assuming the WSJ’s numbers are correct). But I think this is where Google’s “Darwinian” culture (re product launches) has hindered an otherwise potentially successful product.

We’ll see next year if Google tries to build some more substantial marketing around it.

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TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has been using Checkout and has very favorable things to say about it.

Matt Marshall at VentureBeat excerpted part of a roundtable discussion (published at Fortune) that featured Marissa Mayer, VP of Search & User Experience at Google. The relevant portion of the discussion for this post is this:

[Arianna] HUFFINGTON: Whatever products Google is developing, they are incorporating a 60 Percent to 70 percent failure rate. I find that utterly fascinating. Talk about that culture and how that translates into our lives.

[Marissa] MAYER: As we’ve grown, one of our challenges has been: How can we continue to innovate? We have a theory around failing fast. If you assume that one in five things you do will turn out to be really successful, and maybe two of five will be moderately successful, and the other two will languish, you want to do a lot of things. It’s all about being agile. Most of the teams at Google are three to ten people. Five people launched Google News. About five people launched Google Toolbar. They operate like small companies inside the large company. Google is a lot like managing a VC firm, because you’re placing bets on different teams. Our organization mirrors the Internet. It looks more like a network than a hierarchy.

Noise, More Noise and the Value of Brand

I met yesterday with Peter Pezaris, president of social media site Multiply. Multiply is a communication and media sharing site that focuses on one’s immediate contacts (family and friends) and those once removed. I previously wrote about the company here.

Multiply got started around roughly the same time as MySpace but is playing tortoise to MySpace’s hare-on-speed (or crack if you prefer). Pezaris told me that the site has about 3.5 million monthly uniques and that its traffic is growing steadily. As I was driving to meet Pezaris for lunch I thought that the site, whose tools and functionality are impressive, really lacks a brand identity and that’s its central challenge.

Pezaris and I talked about the difficult task of translating the site’s somewhat complex user proposition – communication and media sharing with a selected group of contacts – into a simple marketing slogan/concept. The site is launching a new-and-improved version next Monday.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about the value and role of brand in crowded online segments recently. I don’t know whether I’m tired or precisely what . . . It just seems like everything is getting a lot more noisy of late with more and more companies and their widgets entering the market weekly, making grandiose but similar-sounding claims.

Behold, again, the “Web 2.0″ gallery.

Take comparison engines as an example. A new shopping site launches every couple of weeks it seems, with many of them making similar claims about breadth, depth or comprehensiveness (See, e.g., Pronto and TheFind). My belief is that the more noise there is in a particular segment the more people fall back on familiar sites and habitual behaviors. So the paradox, my theory goes, is the more competitive and crowded a segment, the more the incumbents and established players benefit.

Here’s some data on market share for selected shopping sites (I chose the sites) from Hitwise that was provided to me by Research Director LeeAnn Prescott:

This obviously doesn’t capture the total online shopping universe. But among the sites I asked Hitwise to compare, look at Amazon at 50.7% market share. Amazon isn’t exactly a comparison engine but it does compete with them for consumer traffic around product search.

I would argue that Amazon has that market share because of its longevity but also because the site has a bona fide brand, whereas most of the other sites do not. Shopping.com isn’t so much a brand as a great URL.

Feel free to disagree with me.

Monday Miscellany

Yahoo! Shopping redesigns with a range of features. Here’s more from Search Engine Journal and further explanation from the Yahoo! Shopping Blog.

New search engine, Collarity, with a mix of personalization and “social search” capabilities, launches. Here’s more from iMedia. What’s almost immediately clear is that the differentiators are too involved for mainstream users. I’ll look deeper later.

Matt Marshall’s VentureBeat covers video “contextual” ad-insertion company BrightRoll.

Comcast has announced plans to add user-generated video content to its service. Here’s more from the WSJ (sub req’d) and LostRemote.

Son of Froogle: Google

Many have been blogging about screenshots (first discovered by Garrett Rogers) that reveal the likely replacement for Froogle, which was pulled from the links above the Google search box, is a more product-savvy Google itself.

See: eWeek, Garrett Rogers, Brian Smith’s Comparison Engines.

Froogle may survive as a vertical, but it appears that Google will offer more “one box” data on products directly in Google search results. Map view (described in the various posts) is about local inventory information. This will soon be a critical component of any shopping engine that wants to be really competitive. See my post on NearbyNow.

Again, Consumers Shop Online but Buy Offline

In yet another confirmation that the dominant shopping paradigm is not going to be ecommerce but Internet-influenced offline buying, Yahoo! yesterday released results of a large consumer study conducted with the Consumer Electronics Association. The study involved more than 2,000 US adults and focused on five categories of consumer electronics.

At the highest level the survey found that people are using more information sources (both on and offline) to conduct research before buying, which is correlated with how “considered” (read: expensive) the purchase is.

Here are some of the findings:

• Of all purchasers of CE products in the study, online buyers were a significant minority (29%), while most purchases happened in local stores (71%). Of those buying offline, almost three quarters conducted online research prior to purchase.
• On average CE consumers in the study used visited six manufacturer and/or retail sites before purchase. In navigating to those sites 55% used a search engine to go to the site, while 46% directly entered a URL. Approximately 10% followed a link from another site.
• In terms of the range of sources used by purchasers (both online and off), the top four in order were as follows: 1) Internet 2) print 3) word of mouth 4) retail/other.
• One of the conclusions of the study was that of the $32.5 billion spent on the five consumer electronics categories in the first six months of the year, online research influenced $25.1 billion of that spending. Among the online sources, the study also concluded that search had a direct or indirect influence on $15.2 billion of CE buying.

I’ve written this up in slightly more detail over at Search Engine Watch.

Overall, the findings indicate that the Internet as a medium is a critical influence on offline buying behavior, but not the exclusion of other sources including traditional media like newspapers and TV.

I also lump this phenomenon into the category of “local search” because most people, once they’ve done their research, are looking locally for a place to buy the desired product.

SingleFeed Simplifies Shopping for SMEs

Say that 10 times fast.

Brian Smith, an independent analyst and blogger, who writes ComparisonEngines.com and VerticalSearch.net and for Search Engine Watch, has launched a business that simplifies the process of submitting feeds to shopping engines. It’s intended for small merchants.

The site (not yet live) is SingleFeed.com. According to the release I received, here’s how it works:

SingleFeed saves merchants a significant amount of time and money by allowing them to create an optimized data feed and correct all errors for that feed through the online service. No software download is required. It might take a little longer to create the SingleFeed, but merchants only have to do it once. Because of his background in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Brian developed SingleFeed with Data Feed Optimization (DFO) in mind, requiring fields that might be optional, but that significantly improve results when used in the right way. Brian and his team will also manually categorize product listings for Shopzilla, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Become, and Smarter.com, as proper categorization is one of the biggest drivers of success for merchants.

Best of all, SingleFeed is affordable. During the Beta period, merchants can submit to Google Base (which automatically gets the merchant on Froogle and possibly Google itself) for the special price of $4.99 per month in October and November. Deluxe Submission to Google Base plus any or all of the other 7 shopping comparison engines SingleFeed supports will be just $99.99 per month plus a one-time $29.99 set up fee in October and November.

SingleFeed is consistent with online marketing simplification and syndication programs going on across the Internet for service businesses and, to a lesser degree, product sellers. Most recently Google announced a deal with Intuit (which acquired StepUp) that will enable QuickBooks users to deliver their product inventories to Google.

Newpaper Sites’ Traffic Growing

This MediaPost piece (reg. req’d) republishes NAA data that shows very healthy 31% growth for online newspaper readership. The NAA says there were about 55.5 million monthly uniques at US newspaper sites in the aggregate, in the first half of 2006. The NAA also points to growth in the desirable 18-34 year old demographic segment.

Here’s more information regarding the composition of the online newspaper audience.

The challenge for newspapers is to take that audience and turn them from readers into shoppers/buyers. While print newspapers were found to be the single greatest influence on local shopping by the Dieringer Research Group in 2005, online newspapers were last in their influence.

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Related: Here’s another MediaPost piece that summarizes financial analysts’ relatively grim assessment of the newspaper industry as a whole. But Lexis-Nexis found that among US users traditional media have more credibility than online media when it comes to important news.

Kevin Ryan on the Importance of UGC

The inimitable Kevin Ryan writes about the importance of user-generated content, ratings and reviews. I obviously agree that this is now critical stuff for publishers in helping consumers make buying decisions.

More Newspaper News

Oodle, which previously hired former Knight Ridder Digital executive Lem Lloyd, has hired another newspaper executive in the UK: Associated Newspapers’ Duncan Dunlop. Described in press materials as “a man with over 10 years’ experience in new media following senior positions at Thomas Cook, Yell, Yahoo! and Lycos is joining Oodle as their UK general manager.”

Oodle has had a UK site since May and has a partnership with News Corp.’s Sun newspaper. 

Separately Cox Ohio Publishing, a division of Cox Newspapers, has announced that it will implement HarvestINFO’s shopping and local search applications on eight Ohio websites it operates in southwestern Ohio.

Judysbook Expands into Coupons, ‘Social Shopping’

Here are the deals and here’s the press release, which explains that the deals are showcased in a . . .

[C]ommunity-powered index of the best local and national shopping bargains to be found both on and off the Web. The site includes information about the best buys from leading national retailers like Amazon.com, GAP, Office Depot, Apple, and Dell, plus current deals from top-rated local merchants.

All deals on the site are rated for quality and value by the Judy’s Book community, with top-rated deals promoted to a “Hot Deals” list that updates continuously throughout the day. Any registered member can vote on any deal, or enhance an existing deal by adding information, photos and other details. Members can also earn cash rebates from participating merchants when they purchase through the links on the site . . .

This new feature set extends the company’s commitment to savvy shoppers across the U.S. Because most consumer shopping still happens locally, Judy’s Book is currently building tools and features to help merchants and consumers surface local shopping information, and will also be integrating local shopping feeds from outside sources over the next several months. Local merchants can currently obtain free online distribution for their current offers and discounts by visiting http://www.judysbook.com/merchant/ and registering their business with the company.

This comes after Google’s deal with ValPak and its own self-service coupon creation option. For Judysbook this appears to be both a differentiation strategy (for both consumers and merchants) as well as a diversification strategy for the company’s business model. This also puts Judysbook into the emerging category of “social shopping.”

Expect other local sites to embrace coupons fairly rapidly.

I’ll be talking to Judysbook COO Chris DeVore later today and will update this post after the conversation.

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I discovered on my call that Judysbook also has a deal with ValPak, which isn’t resting on Google distribution (wisely). And they discussed with me some aspects of their new shopping and deals model which are very interesting but not yet ready for public consumption. More to come.

Overall, the shopping and deals are going to be a welcome content addition to the local services directory content.

‘Social Shopping’: Novelty or the Next Wave?

Bob Tedeschi writes in the NY Times (reg. req’d) about a new category in online shopping: “social shopping.” I’ve argued that the next wave in the development of shopping involves two trends, community and local inventory. Regarding the former, the question is: what is novelty and what adds real value? It’s clear where the value is inventory/local store information (where can I buy it today?).

First and foremost community is valuable in providing reviews and ratings. That’s now ubiquitous in online shopping and has spawned a cottage industry: product review syndicators. There’s also a valuable “discovery” element (e.g., Kaboodle and Yahoo!’s Shopophere), where people compile “pick lists” or “wish lists” or recommendations that help you as a consumer discover ideas or products that you wouldn’t have found on your own. (A great example of community integration [and much more valuable than in shopping] is Yahoo!’s Trip Planner.)

But how far “social networking” can or should be integrated into shopping is another question. Sites like ThisNext (featured in the NY Times article) are helpful and, from a blogging standpoint, serve those with a gear fetish who want to sound off all day on cameras or running shoes they like. But it strikes me that this site — though very nicely designed — is more about Web2.0 novelty than real consumer value that helps it differentiate from the throng in an already too-crowded online shopping space.

Paradoxically, the more competitors there are in a segment the more habitual behavior becomes reinforced. Because people feel inundated by choices, they stay with what’s familiar.

Yokel Expands Bay Area ‘Local’ Coverage

The “local shopping” segment is starting to heat up with NearbyNow, ShopLocal, Yokel, Become, CNET and Froogle (and soon newspapers) offering some version of local, offline shopping data and inventory information.

More on Yokel from a release issued today:

Yokel, Inc. today announced it has expanded its capabilities to offer shoppers in the San Francisco Bay area the most complete local shopping search results, making it easier to find the products they need at a store closest to them. Yokel, a national online shopping search engine, now includes an expanded number of Bay area retailers ranging from large chain stores to small local stores and “Best of the Bay” award winners.

As I’ve said many many times before, this is what consumers want and it completes the comparison shopping value proposition. (There are business model challenges, which certainly are not insurmoutable.)

The “local” information is challenging and difficult to get but incredibly valuable once you get it. I suspect NearbyNow or someone else will be syndicating or licensing this content (StepUp is doing a version of this with about 5,000+ local retailers today) relatively soon (in the same way that’s now happening with user reviews).

Kaboodle Lays Claim to ‘Social Shopping’

Other than Yahoo!’s “Shoposphere” the comparison engines haven’t really clued into social media — other than merchant and product ratings. They’re on the CPC gravy train and probably aren’t thinking too hard about where the Internet is going. But sharing/bookmarking/social search site Kaboodle has now added price-comparison shopping and groups, among a couple of other new features.

Here’s the release.

Kaboodle has only been live since February of this year and is moving aggressively to establish itself among the top tier of social media sites. Along those lines it recently announced a deal with eBay.

Shopping on the site is powered by Shopping.com’s API (a smart innovation on its part to gain broader distribution for merchants). Individuals create pick lists/collections, which can be of products (e.g., “Outdoor Furniture“) or other Web content (e.g., information on religion). Users can search the site for public collections and see what people have saved. For example, here’s a search in Travel for “Europe trips.” (Similar, but less developed than Yahoo! Trip Planner.)

Back to products . . . Users can click on particular collections (teak bench) and get price comparison data and potentially buy via the Shopping.com partnership.

Since one of the big consumer use cases for comparison engines is price shopping, this is a great service to integrate into Kaboodle’s social content. Now users don’t have to go off site to check prices or to buy.

The new Groups allows users to collect and share content, ideas, etc. and is also a logical extension of the site’s value proposition.

Note that Shopping.com is an eBay company as well. eBay, as I suggested in the post regarding Kaboodle’s earlier partnership, is a likely acquirer. An integration of Shopping.com and Kaboodle would make sense and help differentiate Shopping.com from competitors.

Make Good: Search Engine User Demographics

At the SES show in San Jose I promised a bunch of people I would get them information on search engine user demographics. Mea culpa: I never did. So, here’s data on the demographic differences (male percentages) by search engine (based on 6/05 comScore data):

• Google: 51.5%
• Yahoo: 49.7%
• MSN Search: 49%
• AOL Search: 48.1%
• Ask: 46.3%

Also from that dataset (percentage of visitors more likely than the general Internet population to buy online):

• Google 42%
• Yahoo!: 31%
• MSN: 48%
• AOL: 3%
• Ask: 17%

It has been a year since these data came out so the numbers may have changed at the margins.

Yahoo! Ads Coupon ‘Shortcut’

Is this new shortcut (e.g., “Dell Coupons”) a response to the Google Maps coupon deal? I’m wondering (Yahoo! would certainly argue no.) Regardless, consumers benefit so it doesn’t matter what the motivation.

Here’s Brian Smith’s brief write-up in today’s Search Engine Watch blog.

NearbyNow Brings New ‘Inventory’ to Local

The “holy grail” of online shopping is local inventory information. Paradoxical as it may sound I say that because the overwhelming majority of transactions occur in local stores and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Though e-commerce is growing fast, growing much faster is the influence of the Internet on offline transactions. Those Internet-influenced local transactions, worth more than $350 billion annually and climbing, typically start online in the form of price comparison shopping or product research.

Yet real-time inventory information has so far been elusive for most shopping sites – even those that offer local information, including ShopLocal, Yokel, Froogle, CNET and Become. All of these, to varying degrees, have local data but most of it is “proxy information” for inventory (i.e., item is normally carried or on special).

A new site called NearbyNow is pulling together real-time POS (”point of sale”) inventory information from retailers large and small and presenting it through local-mall portal sites. The first up is for the company is Eastridge Mall in San Jose, Ca. On this site you can search for specific products and sale items. Nothing can be purchased online; it’s all about driving people into local stores.

You can read the rest of this post at Search Engine Watch.

Google Checkout and Customer Ownership

Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines has an interesting post (citing research from Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy) on retailer fear surrounding Google’s control of customer data and the customer relationship. (Eric Schmidt in his remarks at SES gave an unsatisfying implied “trust us” response regarding Google’s management of customer data and consumer privacy concerns).

But back to Smith’s post and Checkout: Piper Jaffray surveyed 30 online retailers and found that 81% were unlikely to implement Google Checkout chiefly because of concerns that they would have a limited ability to market directly to consumers and that Google would “own” the consumer relationship.

For Google, this points out the need to do two things sooner rather than later: 1) allay those retailers’ fears and work with them to mitigate the perception that Google wants to “own” their customers and 2) strongly market Checkout to consumers (e.g., full-page ads in newspapers, radio commercials, etc.) so that retailers have an incentive to participate in the system beyond the AdWords deal.

Checkout was briefly featured on Google’s homepage (maybe for 24 - 36 hours). To its credit (so to speak) Google is currently offering $10 off on back-to-school purchases of $30 or more as a consumer incentive to use the system. That’s a nice discount. Yet Checkout remains buried unless you’re specifically looking for it. And we saw what happened to Froogle when Google took it off the homepage. 

Here’s my earlier post about how Checkout could/should become a shopping destination (part of a hypothetical, re-branded “Google Shopping”).

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Related: Consider how Google’s new local coupon initiative might ultimately integrate with discounts on e-commerce via Checkout.

Also, you can read the full transcript or see the video of Eric Schmidt’s interview with Danny Sullivan at SES. You can read Andrew Goodman’s write-up of Schmidt’s remarks here.

Google-ValPak Coupons Deal

Even though I’m quoted in some of the stories about the Google Maps coupons announcement I was on vacation when the announcement formally happened so I didn’t see the implementation. (Let me tell you how surreal it was taking calls on the beach on Monday.)Much has been written by others on this already so I’ll be brief:

• This deal is important for ValPak, which can now sell Google distribution to local merchants. But it also poses dangers in the long run – similar to those all Google’s partners face
• Consumers will search Maps for coupons. I found my local pizza place there and will go back for similar offers in the future. Word of mouth and serendipitous discovery will take care of the consumer side of the equation. This is a differentiator for Google Maps from Yahoo, Windows Live Local and MapQuest. (Yahoo! Local has allowed merchants to point to offers or coupons for some time but doesn’t have coupon creation per se. Yahoo! Local also isn’t a coupon “destination” as Google Maps has now potentially become.)
• Coverage is an issue: 20K coupons from ValPak to start is strong but gets thin at the individual community level. So self-service will need to kick in to make this a truly rich user experience
• Self-service: the coupon creation process is very simple, which suggests businesses will use it. But it’s still a little buried. Google can still do more to promote this
• Re the “threat to newspapers”: This does not increase the threat to the printed product and people don’t go to newspaper sites for coupons today. Accordingly it does potentially threaten the ability of newspapers to translate their offline value proposition online.
• Zixxo becomes something of the white-label anti-Google here for those who now believe they need to offer coupons to compete. Certainly ValPak would do more of those distribution deals too.