In the Internet age, fixed prices are past-style

Absrtact: In the Internet age, fixed prices are past-style. Decide co-founder Orengezioni (Oren Etzioni) bare mystery, the June 2011 online Parity forecast site is clearly early recognition of this, and now it has become America's most

"In the Internet age, fixed prices are past-style. ”

Decide co-founder Ollen Eziony (Oren etzioni) bare mystery, the June 2011 online Parity forecast site is clearly early aware of this, it has become the most popular U.S. shopping vane, monthly user visits up to hundreds of thousands of, Page views are more than 1 million times and are still growing at a high rate.

In the 90 's, airlines kept changing ticket prices based on the number of spare seats on one flight and the price of competitors. The hotel also soon followed, introducing their "revenue management" system so that they could change room prices at any time. Today, this dynamic pricing model is gradually deepening into every corner of the consumer economy. To get to the top of the search results, retailers are changing the prices of goods-from toilet paper to bicycles-in hours, sometimes even minutes. This war in the annual holiday shopping season will reach the peak of time, in the face of this situation, consumers eyes shining, but also helpless.

In fact, the consumer's obsession is much more than that. Where is the product cheaper to sell? What's the right time to buy a new one? What do other people think? The questions about the consumers, including Google Shopping, Nextag, PriceGrabber and Amazon product Search, the parity site has only solved the most basic first question. Where there is demand there is a market, decide emerged.

Decide chief executive Mack Fredegen Mike Fridgen as "The big data version of the Consumer Report" (Note: American authoritative consumer magazine), which is indeed a "magical website."

Jiede: Technology Driven

Decide's first magical thing is to get 8.5 million of dollars of investment on concept, which is a very typical American innovation and entrepreneurship Project, and its founders and project teams are equally legendary.

Co-founder Ollen Eziony is a very experienced guy who has worked as a search engine MetaCrawler, worked as an Air force forecaster, and was the founder of the famous travel search website Farecast, chief executive Mike Fredegen, Farecast's former vice president of marketing and product development, started with them with several Farecast engineers. In 2008, Microsoft bought Farecast for $115 million, the predecessor of Bing Travel. They used the technology and algorithms previously used to track ticket prices to the index products of the decide website.

In addition, decide has also absorbed the early developers of PRICEYETI (tracking changes in the price of online purchases, using mail to inform users when they cut prices), and eggsprout (compiling biographical data). Before the site on the line, they spent two years of retreat, although the business of their own will not be secretive, but with "let electronic shopping unprecedented transparency" slogan, they from Maveron, Madrona Venture Group, Google founder Board members Ram Schlam ( Ram Shriram), former Expedia chief executive Eric Brackford (Erik Blachford) and other channels raised a total of 8.5 million dollars in financing.

On decide's web site, they describe themselves as "decide use data and technology to help buyers, not as a means of marketing." "With such a luxurious technical talent lineup, decide is undoubtedly a typical technology-driven start-up company, as a product search company, which is critical."

Perspective: the ultimate in data

The aim of decide is to solve two problems: Electronic product update speed too fast, market price changes too fast. By addressing these two issues, they want to offer the best opportunity for potential shoppers, and behind all this is technology-driven data mining and extreme use.

First, they built a "linear analysis model", add tens of thousands of electronic products to your own database, using proprietary price forecasting algorithms, by taking into account billions of price volatility information and over 40 different price factors (including new release cycle, news coverage, company announcements, etc.) To make a full forecast of the price.

Faced with numerous data processing, decide with low threshold of operation experience and intuitive comprehensive results show to make everything simple, convenient and decisive. The user makes the login decide.com, just enter in the search box specific want to buy electronic products, decide.com will be based on their own proprietary technology to predict whether the return should be purchased or should wait for the proposal. If users want to buy, they can continue to click into their chosen sellers for purchase. If the user does not want to buy at the moment according to the advice given by decide.com, then they can watch the price timeline and set themselves a notice to cut prices.

Just bought the IPhone 4s,iphone 5 on the market, such trouble decide has also been taken into account. In the search results, decide will show the product's full update timeline, lest you still wander around the old product, new rumors can be found here. Decide has recorded hundreds of thousands of electronic products in its "model pedigree", automatically searching for new messages and rumors in technical blogs and websites, and applying "Advanced machine learning and text mining algorithms" To predict future product launches. To be intimate, decide also gives a "confidence index" that allows users to understand how likely a new product will be listed in the coming period.

Even if this is not enough, decide is committed to giving users the ability to make the right decision at once, even if all these charts are discarded, the user still has the quickest way to make a decision, whether to buy or to see the score. Decide score product scoring system will refer to a number of users and experts on the evaluation of a product, the time of the evaluation and the number of previous generations of the product, giving a score between 1 and 100, and dividing the product into "we love it" according to the rating, "We Like It", "you'd better choose another "Don't buy it" four grades, one-time become easier.

All of this is presented to the user in the form of a chart on the same page.

Under's decide is also trying to expand its sphere of influence, on the one hand to expand the range of products from electronic products to household appliances, sporting goods, home and gardening supplies, and other dozens of categories, on the other hand, also expanding partners, the consumer report and online parity service Bizrate has joined its " Circle of Friends. " Mobile app on the line is to let the power of decide expanded to the offline.

Survival: Justice First

As a product based on the price of the company, there is no doubt that there are two income model, from the business to make money from the user. Google, the industry's giant, has chosen the former, and this September, Google Shopping officially paid for cooperative merchants, and Google acknowledges that product search results will be influenced by retailers and advertisers.

By contrast, decide, who has been charging profits for its retailers, started experimenting with a new business model this October, turning the previously free price forecast service into a 5-dollar monthly, 29.99-dollar compensations payment system, which is decide's killer feature. In the forecast failure compensations plan, if decide gives the best buying time after the commodity continues to reduce prices, decide will compensate the difference for the consumer. But when to buy and other services are still open for free.

Why did decide make such a transition? Mack Fredegen explained that this is to reduce their reliance on advertising revenue, so that the site's commodity forecasting services more impartial and objective. Essentially, a company's service depends on where its money comes from. If decide's revenue comes from advertisers, their commodity forecasts are being held hostage by advertisers. But for users, the data is valuable only when the site's data reflects real market conditions.

Decide transfer to the user although there is a certain risk, but can be guaranteed to serve users, to ensure that the recommended fair, which is in line with the long-term development of the site, but also in line with the interests of consumers. Since its launch in June 2011, decide has provided services to more than 10 million users, saving 127 million of billions of dollars in potential costs, enough to get consumers to pull out their wallets.

Where is the decide of China?

In the other half of the ball in China, there is also a large number of parity search sites, compared to decide technology driven and user-oriented, the existence of these products is still only a prototype, become "Chinese version of Decide" is even more difficult.

Macroscopic view, the local comparison site can be divided into two categories, the electric business enterprise-oriented and third-party independent type. For the electricity quotient of the price of the site, both when the referee and when the model of the athletes is difficult to convince, not to mention the frequent disputes of the electricity prices war is to let consumers see what is the fight. Independent growth of third-party parity site survival Chaos, China's electricity market has now entered a highly centralized oligopoly era, Taobao, Beijing-east, Suning and other easy to purchase accounted for more than 90% of the market share, such a strong position so that the search site is difficult to compare the provision of related services to the electricity business enterprise charges, And these parity site and difficult to have decide powerful technology to let consumers pay, the survival pressure under the malicious ranking phenomenon repeatedly see more than, into a vicious circle.

Decide is still a legend for China's electricity business.

And in the United States of decide, new forms of shopping guide sites are still emerging, such as "compare everything for You" find the best, Wal-Mart's social semantic shopping search Polaris, popular mobile shopping start-ups leap Commerce Shopping guide Application Spark, Their new model is innovating the traditional shopping orientation.

Fredegen once said: "Big data gives us every opportunity to build the next generation of consumer propaganda services, it is our goal." ”

Big data is no longer an empty concept, it is immersed in our lives.