What is your favorite shopping portal on the Internet? When you are looking to buy something on the Internet, is there a particular site that you choose first? Can you even name a shopping portal? A shopping portal can be defined as a funnel leading you to where you want to go to buy products
Many internet users are unaware of the "shopping portal battle" that is going on right now. However there is currently a huge battle to see who can get the most traffic, ad revenue and purchases to their shopping portal. Many major internet companies are currently vying to become your shopping portal of choice. Familiar companies like Amazon, eBay, and of course Google, are all strategizing and developing their marketing plans in order to become your favorite shopping portal in the future.
To help understand the shopping portal battle a little more clearly, it is helpful to look back in Internet history ten or eleven years or so and see what happened in the battle for search engine domination. Back in 2002, there were many more search engines that there are today. For example, there was Lycos, Ask, Altavista, Excite, Webcrawler, MSN, Yahoo, and many others that were competing to be your search engine of choice. Google was not a significant player back then because they had just started operations in 1998. However in just 5 short years, Google took over 75% of the search engine business. Google had a better business model and a better search engine that enabled them to dominate the search engine market.
Today a smiliar battle is taking place in the Shopping Search Engine arena. Only this battle promises to be more intense than the search engine battle was. Why? Because there is a lot more money in people looking to buy something than people who are just looking for information.
Now along comes a European based company called DubLi. DubLi’s founder, Michael Hansen, carefully studied and examined the “reverse auction” model in 2003 and concluded there was a huge opportunity for growth in the multi-billion dollar consumer market. Hansen, with the DubLi "reverse auction" concept, envisioned showcasing the best selling in-demand products and services from the most well known and reputable companies in the world; only those with a household name would qualify.
With this unique "reverse auction" concept where the lowest bidder wins, DubLi’s stated goal is to become the "world’s largest shopping portal". DubLi is currently using these reverse auctions to drive traffic to their site, but they ultimately want to drive this traffic to their shopping mall where shoppers can choose from over 1,000 online retailers and earn reward points for their purchases.
Will DubLi be able to dominate the "Shopping Search Engine Battle" and become the world’s largest shopping portal?
Only time will tell. Stay tuned.
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