Shopping site TheFind is repositioning itself as a personalized, multiplatform shopping utility that does more than simply give consumers access to product information and prices. It’s now a dashboard for managing all e-commerce transactions in a single place, regardless of whether purchases were made through TheFind or on other sites.
Shopping search has become something of a commodity. And with Google PLAs it’s getting harder for shopping sites to appear in search results. Accordingly TheFind is moving beyond commodity shopping search with an emphasis on mobile user acquisition and personalization.
CEO Siva Kumar told me that user acquisition was easier and better than “traffic acquisition” for one-off purchases and that TheFind’s mobile apps are a key part of that strategy shift.
TheFind’s site and apps now become increasingly personalized as users engage with them. If you’re signed in ,TheFind compiles click, search and purchase data (across platforms) that will train results over time and make personalized recommendations accordingly. The company has also partnered with Slice to track receipts and shipping, which expands the site’s functionality and also offers more data for personalization.
In addition TheFind’s apps incorporate a browser to remove checkout friction by storing credit card information that can be populated into third party e-commerce shopping carts.
Kumar and I discussed broader shopping and e-commerce trends. He said that “online shopping” is moving away from the PC and becoming a multiplatform experience. He told me that TheFind’s mobile traffic is growing 8 percent to 10 percent month over month and now constitutes 35 percent of its total traffic.
He further explained that roughly 13 percent of that traffic is from the iPad, 11 percent is from the iPhone and the remainder comes from Android smartphones.
Kumar also said that meaningful incremental traffic is now coming from iPad searches at home during the evening. He said that this constitutes a new shopping block in addition to other times during the day.
I asked Kumar whether he had any visibility into smartphone searches. He told me that “70 percent of smartphone searches are inside stores; the other 30 percent are everywhere else.”
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