eBay has relaunched Shopping.com as the eBay Commerce Network, a move which will aim to reflect the platform's evolution from a single destination comparison shopping engine into a leading commerce network.
Speaking to The Drum shortly before the news was made public, UK country manager Dave McCall described the relaunch as “more of a coming of age than a name change” and explained that “the relaunch would bring the brand in line with the core eBay commitment to enabling commerce”.
He continued: “While we started our life as a price comparison destination site and though that all remains true, we had to diversify. We took the functionality we had on Shopping.com and shared it with different publishing companies so we now have a much wider reach to the online population, shoppers don’t need to come to Shopping.com to use our service.”
The eBay Commerce Network will now allow merchants to advertise their products on eBay and other websites connecting thousands of merchants with consumers through a robust network of publishers.
Speaking of the figures, McCall added: “We represent 8,000 different retailers and what they give us access to is 160 million different products that we can package up and distribute through our network and our relationships with over 2,000 publishers. In the end we communicate with 250 million consumers globally each month.”
Since its acquisition by eBay in 2005 Shopping.com’s model has transformed dramatically and part of that transformation, according to McCall, is the changing attitude of consumers to online shopping: “When I started in digital media in 2000 the UK e-commerce market was valued at £2 million and if I go by IMRG figures for 2012 that’s grown 40 fold in the space of 12 years, it just shows that online shopping is going from strength to strength.”
In discussing future ambitions for the network McCall cited eBay’s motto of “enabling commerce” and highlighted mobile and tablet usage as a big indicator of this: “What we’re looking at is the when and the how and working with our publishers who are optimising their web presence for different devices and making sure we’re privy to every touchpoint. It’s not changing to meet our own ends, we’re changing because we’re watching how everyone else is,” said McCall.
“Just three years ago m-commerce was nowhere, and today it represents some really sizeable revenues. It’s having such a massive impact on retail and more so for companies like eBay where part of their strategic vision is about enabling commerce and having mobile at its heart.”
Following the relaunch Shopping.com will retain its brand as an eBay Commerce Network publisher. The network itself will offer access to consumers at any stage of their shopping experience, access to flexible technology to give publishers real-time access to services, products, features, listing and merchants, value based pricing with publishers to be paid according the quality of traffic they send to merchants and the largest paid selection of online product listings across the US, UK, France, Germany and Australia.