March 16, 2015
Facebook acquires shopping search site
Facebook has acquired TheFind, a sophisticated e-commerce search app. The acquisition is said to be less about online selling and more about improving the relevance of the social network’s advertising.
The eight-year-old startup, which bills itself as "the only way to search the entire shoppable web," has earned its popularity as a search and price comparison site. Putting a description such as black cocktail dress in TheFind brings up scores of results from Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, Modcloth and other websites. The company claims to offer half a billion products across half a billion stores, which include Amazon, Target, Best Buy and other major chains.
TheFind promises to allow users to "compare prices on any product from every store at once, including tax and shipping," as well as seek out coupons. More recently, it began personalizing those searches by tapping users’ buying behavior and preferences shown on Facebook through "likes" and demographic information on their profile.
The search engine will shut down in the next few weeks. Facebook said it plans to use TheFind’s technology to better tailor ads to its members’ interests.
"Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers," Facebook said in a statement released to the media. "Our business is about connecting people with the topics, companies, brands, and increasingly products they care about and we look forward to doing that with TheFind on board."
"Facebook’s resources and platform give us the opportunity to scale our expertise in product sourcing to the over one billion people that use the platform," wrote TheFind on its website.
The acquisition comes as Facebook has begun testing "buy" buttons that let advertisers sell products through advertisements on the social network.
While Facebook has sought to find ways to profit from people finding things to buy as they browse their social networks, it hasn’t always succeeded. For example, the company discontinued a service that sent birthday gifts. Now, Facebook is focusing its efforts on e-commerce-related ads and putting direct links to products that are later purchased.
- Facebook Buys a Company That Could Solve an Annoying Online Ad Problem – Adweek
- Biz Break: Facebook acquires TheFind, a Mountain View shopping search site – San Jose Mercury News
- Facebook Buys And Shuts Down Shopping Site TheFind To Boost Commerce In Ads – TechCrunch
- Facebook Snags E-Commerce Startup TheFind: Injecting Steroids Into Facebook Ads? – Tech Times
- Facebook Acquires Social Shopping App TheFind – The Wall Street Journal (sub. required)
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Discussion Questions
What will the acquisition of TheFind mean for Facebook? Do you agree the deal should be more about enhancing Facebook’s advertising than online selling?
Poll
Facebook’s acquisition of TheFind has two apparent strategies. 1. Provide a vehicle to bring a younger demographic back to Facebook and 2. further monetize the social media network. Facebook can make whatever public claims they want in terms of their reasons but the bottom line is always the bottom line—money. In the end, whether its about advertising relevance or online selling simply doesn’t matter. Ideally, from Facebook’s perspective, it’s both. The world at that scale is still about reach and frequency. With Facebook’s reach, there will always be a line of advertisers that still do their math only one way: CPM, and Facebook has a lot of M!
If you can achieve both advertisers and grabbing a percentage of online purchasing through a single site then all the more power.
Facebook could certainly improve their advertising. For a company that collects a phenomenal amount of information about their users, their targeting seems to come down to broad generalizations about demographics. However, as with all targeted advertising, it is important for users to not feel stalked.
As far as online selling, I think Facebook has a lot of customer satisfaction issues to solve before expanding into selling. If anything I would advise Facebook to team up with Shutterfly or a similar photo printing service to try and monetize the large amounts of photos people store on their pages.
I think this is entirely about Facebook’s advertising, inclusive of “add-to-cart” ads similar to those Amazon and Twitter have pioneered together.
Not only are marketers’ expectations for more sophisticated targeting capabilities increasing, but shoppers are coming to expect more content about products online. This acquisition might be a step (likely one of several) along Facebook’s path to sustainable relevance.
Facebook will always continue to improve ways to make their ads more relevant which in turn will make Facebook an even more desirable platform for brand ad dollars.
Acquiring TheFind adds another capability to Facebook’s existing portfolio. TheFind is the ultimate online product aggregator and search engine. I would expect TheFind’s relevance ranking engine and search algorithm to be the key motivator for the acquisition. And yes, it’s about Facebook’s advertising first and foremost.
Personally I don’t get it. Apparently they want to bring us a better “Facebook ads experience.” Is that what consumers are all wishing for, a better ad experience? Aren’t we all trying to avoid ads? That’s what fast forward, the greatest innovation of all time, is for. (That said, TheFind technology is remarkable.)
Admittedly, I’d personally find this far more exciting if there was anything about the Facebook “experience” that was truly worthwhile. Don’t know about you, but my Facebook experiences can be summed up this way: I’m sorry your dog died, congrats on the grandchild, have fun in Mexico, your “IQ” test is stupid, you’ve put on a lot of weight since that wedding picture and apparently you hate ObamaCare. And now to top it all off … I get to “search the entire shoppable web!” There’s nothing like living life to its fullest potential!
Facebook does need to continue to provide value for its advertisers, however this enhanced capability via the acquisition makes good sense. It also opens up opportunities for more merchants.
It’s too early to say. The question is, how many Facebook users will see this as an enhancement and what percentage will see it as an intrusion?
As for the second question, if I were running Facebook I’d want to maximize my revenue and I’m just not sure enhancing advertising is quite as lucrative as selling.
Let’s call it what it is. This move and acquisition of TheFind is about Facebook’s’ “better ad experience” not members’ “better ad experience.” It’s amazing how well people in general are already doing finding the products, services and prices they want online. They don’t need more “help.”
Online ads are far from meeting their potential. The more relevant to the individual user the better. Facebook has an enormous amount (but not all) of information about each of us. It has the unique opportunity to make use of their service even more relevant.
Can it track and anticipate what I may need? Yeah. What I want? Probably.
I’ll be interested to see how relevant ads become. Hopefully they will stop showing me things based only on my searches, because I don’t need to see ads for things I’ve already purchased.
Last time I checked, this was called an affiliate model. You “advertise” your product on an aggregator like TheFind.com and then “monetize” the ad with a link to an ecommerce site. TheFind takes a cut on the ad spend as well as a rev/share on the purchase. All in could be 5%-8% of sale. Think Google shopping. There’s not much that’s innovative in this approach, so let’s not kid ourselves into call it “social shopping.” It will allow consumers to browse within FB vs. just linking externally. It’s a good move for them. But incrementality will be a bigger challenge for them to prove, just as it is for Google. Time will tell….
If the technology can help Facebook make the ads users see more relevant and helpful and less annoying, the acquisition will definitely be worth it for Facebook. Right now the ads are really intrusive. Improving the process and experience would add value for everyone.
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Facebook’s acquisition of TheFind has two apparent strategies. 1. Provide a vehicle to bring a younger demographic back to Facebook and 2. further monetize the social media network. Facebook can make whatever public claims they want in terms of their reasons but the bottom line is always the bottom line—money. In the end, whether its about advertising relevance or online selling simply doesn’t matter. Ideally, from Facebook’s perspective, it’s both. The world at that scale is still about reach and frequency. With Facebook’s reach, there will always be a line of advertisers that still do their math only one way: CPM, and Facebook has a lot of M!
If you can achieve both advertisers and grabbing a percentage of online purchasing through a single site then all the more power.
Facebook could certainly improve their advertising. For a company that collects a phenomenal amount of information about their users, their targeting seems to come down to broad generalizations about demographics. However, as with all targeted advertising, it is important for users to not feel stalked.
As far as online selling, I think Facebook has a lot of customer satisfaction issues to solve before expanding into selling. If anything I would advise Facebook to team up with Shutterfly or a similar photo printing service to try and monetize the large amounts of photos people store on their pages.
I think this is entirely about Facebook’s advertising, inclusive of “add-to-cart” ads similar to those Amazon and Twitter have pioneered together.
Not only are marketers’ expectations for more sophisticated targeting capabilities increasing, but shoppers are coming to expect more content about products online. This acquisition might be a step (likely one of several) along Facebook’s path to sustainable relevance.
Facebook will always continue to improve ways to make their ads more relevant which in turn will make Facebook an even more desirable platform for brand ad dollars.
Acquiring TheFind adds another capability to Facebook’s existing portfolio. TheFind is the ultimate online product aggregator and search engine. I would expect TheFind’s relevance ranking engine and search algorithm to be the key motivator for the acquisition. And yes, it’s about Facebook’s advertising first and foremost.
Personally I don’t get it. Apparently they want to bring us a better “Facebook ads experience.” Is that what consumers are all wishing for, a better ad experience? Aren’t we all trying to avoid ads? That’s what fast forward, the greatest innovation of all time, is for. (That said, TheFind technology is remarkable.)
Admittedly, I’d personally find this far more exciting if there was anything about the Facebook “experience” that was truly worthwhile. Don’t know about you, but my Facebook experiences can be summed up this way: I’m sorry your dog died, congrats on the grandchild, have fun in Mexico, your “IQ” test is stupid, you’ve put on a lot of weight since that wedding picture and apparently you hate ObamaCare. And now to top it all off … I get to “search the entire shoppable web!” There’s nothing like living life to its fullest potential!
Facebook does need to continue to provide value for its advertisers, however this enhanced capability via the acquisition makes good sense. It also opens up opportunities for more merchants.
It’s too early to say. The question is, how many Facebook users will see this as an enhancement and what percentage will see it as an intrusion?
As for the second question, if I were running Facebook I’d want to maximize my revenue and I’m just not sure enhancing advertising is quite as lucrative as selling.
Let’s call it what it is. This move and acquisition of TheFind is about Facebook’s’ “better ad experience” not members’ “better ad experience.” It’s amazing how well people in general are already doing finding the products, services and prices they want online. They don’t need more “help.”
Online ads are far from meeting their potential. The more relevant to the individual user the better. Facebook has an enormous amount (but not all) of information about each of us. It has the unique opportunity to make use of their service even more relevant.
Can it track and anticipate what I may need? Yeah. What I want? Probably.
I’ll be interested to see how relevant ads become. Hopefully they will stop showing me things based only on my searches, because I don’t need to see ads for things I’ve already purchased.
Last time I checked, this was called an affiliate model. You “advertise” your product on an aggregator like TheFind.com and then “monetize” the ad with a link to an ecommerce site. TheFind takes a cut on the ad spend as well as a rev/share on the purchase. All in could be 5%-8% of sale. Think Google shopping. There’s not much that’s innovative in this approach, so let’s not kid ourselves into call it “social shopping.” It will allow consumers to browse within FB vs. just linking externally. It’s a good move for them. But incrementality will be a bigger challenge for them to prove, just as it is for Google. Time will tell….
If the technology can help Facebook make the ads users see more relevant and helpful and less annoying, the acquisition will definitely be worth it for Facebook. Right now the ads are really intrusive. Improving the process and experience would add value for everyone.