Retail Comparison Shopping

TheFind has developed a remarkable comparison shopping engine, presenting product listings in a visually appealing, “shopping” familiar design. A female bent puts this vertical engine squarely in a niche market yet their unique approach to comparison shopping is the draw: all but guaranteeing comprehensiveness by searching “every store online” to products, brands, and stores that meet your query. Unique? The comparison shopping industry’s fatal flaw, and the direction taken by most CSEs, has been the attempt to monetize clicks to merchants, in turn forcing stores to exclude products that don’t perform and overlook promotion of their most appealing deals. TheFind recognizes the most significant, reasonable expectation of an audience searching for results: comprehensiveness win hearts.

Comprehensiveness aside, as if that weren’t compelling enough, they’ve mastered the art of display results allowing users to truly browse apparel or furniture as one would in-store. An intriguing color selector effectively narrows results by color while prominent search tools “more” and “similar” are valuable and accurate. Other shopping engines will continue to redistribute traffic between one another and arbitrage off Google, TheFind has created a real destination and compelling online shopping experience.

Having recently raised a well deserved third round of $15M with Lightspeed Ventures and Redpoint Ventures led by Bain Capital, they are in a position to significantly enhance the search experience, grow traffic, and develop an ad sales team to monetize the business.

Though strikingly targeted toward a female demographic, a search for typically male products yields decent results but a comparison engine they are not. Search for iPhone and get the same attractive SERP including the here irrelevant color selector and large images. 3 separate results are the phone itself while more pictures of the phone are actually listings for with other products. This frequently happens with comparison shopping sites but in this visual experience it can be terribly misleading; with commodity products, I miss a single result for the phone followed by a comprehensive list of retailers, prices, and offers.

TheFind isn’t the answer for that new PocketPC or Xbox game but where else can you effectively shop for a cherry coffee table? With 527 stores I’d be on the road for weeks shopping for furniture the old fashioned way. Retailers pay attention and make sure you are showing up on TheFind.