Demise of the Shopping Cart Program

Recently Shopping.com began to discretely and quickly shut the doors on it’s Shopping Cart program. Officially, all mention and reference will be removed by end of May from the Shopping.com site.

The Cart program was a modified version of Shopping.com, allowing merchants to sell goods on a commission based format. Shopping.com would handle the check out process with their own payment systems and relay orders back to merchants for processing.

So why the sudden change?

There are no definitive statements beyond a sentiment to move on and focus energy on Shopping.com’s cost per click program. This makes sense as the CPC program is what majority of merchants are using. On the flip side, it’s a good bet that the problems of creating an Amazon style of format of integrated suppliers going through a single checkout and then dispersing those orders, has proven to be too big of an obstacle to overcome. This process continually confounds both retailers tyring to adapt their systems and the marketplace who has to struggle to make it all happen. One of many pitfalls to this type of system is proper order integration with product variations, different shipping configurations, and finally order fulfilment. Once this is all added up, I have a feeling that Shopping.com saw mounting integration costs with too little merchant adoption.

The neatest aspect of the Cart program was the ability to have products listed on eBay Express. This still seems to the golden opportunity that eludes many merchants and what eBay would be best advised to pursue to boost sagging sales and traffic numbers. There is no word yet on what if any solution will be available to get merchants better linked in to a fixed price format on eBay. However, I guarantee you as this is being written, someone in eBay is working on this very issue.

May 19th, 2008