Monday, November 20, 2006




uGenie
The Holidays are upon us again and it's time to do all of our gift shopping, but where o'where!?!? One good option is a new comparison shopping engine: uGenie.com, which was launched recently by Krishna Motukuri, a friend and former Amazon.com colleague. In addition to applying a lot of good Web 2.0 design principals, perhaps uGenie's neatest innovation is leeting you shop for a basket of goods across a number of retailers. They also do a much better job helping you to understand the hidden costs and discounts that you will experience at each ecommerce site.

When I was in business school in 1995-1997, we talked a lot about "low barriers to entry" and minimal "switching costs" in the emerging world of ecommerce ("everything is just a click away!"). The thinking was that this would lead to huge numbers of small sellers competing efficiently online. In reality, the first decade of online shopping saw a relatively small number of retailers dominate the majority of sales. This is because only a handful were truly competitive with offline channels on price, selection, and service.

This is changing, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out on 11/16/06 in an article titled "Web Pioneers eBay and Amazon Face a Threat From Older Retailers." I believe that the 2006 holiday season is shaping up as one of the first years where large numbers of consumers will really want to shop around at a number of etailers. This, combined with the fact that most comparison shopping engines fall short on creating apples to apples comparisons, means that uGenie is a perfectly timed gift!

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