Interview with Become UK
Oct-2009
Shopping comparison engines are an increasingly important way for retailers to reach their customers and drive website traffic. Â I recently caught up with Maricki from Become UK to talk about their offering and plans for the future.
Tell us a bit about your company
BecomeUK is a comparison shopping engine operated by Become, Inc. Become, Inc. is a global leader in comparison shopping and lead generation spanning several verticals, including product shopping and education. Become, Inc. delivers qualified leads to businesses and helps consumers find products and services using its world-class search engine. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, CA, with offices in Tokyo, London, Karlsruhe (Germany) and Milan, Become Inc. operates numerous sites including become.com, become.co.uk, become.co.jp, and education.become.com. Become, Inc. was founded in 2004 by Michael Yang, who was also a founder of comparison shopping engine MySimon. Investors in Become, Inc. include Texas Pacific Group, Transcosmos, and European Founders Fund.
What makes Become different from other online shopping channels
Become Inc. has differentiated itself from other shopping channels through the use of comparison shopping technology and features, such as colour search and Percent Off, which are intended to simplify the online shopping experience and assist the shopper in identifying the best products for them.
We also operate www.shopaholic.become.co.uk, our shopping blog. We try to give customers news, advices, opinions, reviews and helpful tips about particular products. Our blogs are written by product specialists who familiarize themselves with both the products and the market trends they report on in order to deliver reliable and professional blog posts to online shoppers.
How do you produce your results? Is it purely on a PPC basis. Any free listings?
Our business model is strictly CPC, and on our shopping portal each retailer is reviewed prior to approval; we do this to ensure best quality control.
What are Become’s strongest categories
Become UK has a variety of categories to suit our wide online audience. Home and Garden/Technology and Clothing are typically large categories in online shopping and we find that Become’s largest categories tend to reflect the online retail market as a whole.
How do you market Become.co.uk?
Through our functionality including colour search, percent off and the number of products on our site means we get a large amount of repeat visitors. Also for a comparison shopping engine, search relevancy is very important, and our team strives to produce relevant search results which reflect the needs of online users trying to shop for products through our site.
Do you offer any tracking functionality?
For our retail partners, Become UK offers a free ROI tracker in order to optimize their campaign with us. For more information on this, US retailers can contact sales@become.com and international retailers can reach out to sales@become.co.uk.
Plans for the future?
Become, Inc. has recently acquired the German CSE company Pangora, which will assist in our European expansion and continued improvement of our service and features for online shoppers worldwide.
Since Google has cracked down on “thin affiliates”, i.e. websites that merely provide a directory listing of stores in exchange of commission on referrals, savvy websites are now offering more to please Google, which is also good for the consumer. The rise of price comparison and customer review sites is in direct response to this. If anyone is planning to build a new directory today they have to have have a very good plan to ensure that the site is not perceive by the big G as an affiliate site. Become are certainly the latest to cover that well.
However the one thing that they could possibly do better is integrate the blog and the products rather than have separate domains.
Since Google has cracked down on “thin affiliates”, i.e. websites that merely provide a directory listing of stores in exchange of commission on referrals, savvy websites are now offering more to please Google, which is also good for the consumer. The rise of price comparison and customer review sites is in direct response to this. If anyone is planning to build a new online shopping website today they have to have have a very good plan to ensure that the site is not perceive by the big G as an affiliate site. Become are certainly the latest to cover that well.
However the one thing that they could possibly do better is integrate the blog and the products rather than have separate domains.