Saturday, December 09, 2006
Become.com's 2005 vs. 2006: a Chat with Greg Haslam
I've spoken at great length with Yeogirl Yun and got the engineering, geekalicious insights into his background and how that's shaping his work at Become now (Jason interviewed him first here). My conversation with Greg dug into the equally tasty business development and distribution side of Become and, in particular, the phenomenal growth they've had since 2005.
After Greg's background section below I basically put in quotes my paraphrasings of the notes I took from our conversation. Forgive me if it's hard to follow and leave questions for Greg in the comment section if you have them.
First, some background on Greg Haslam
Some of this will be sketchy and partially correct as I typed at great speed as we spoke... forgive me Greg and I will quickly make changes if you email me or comment me on this post.
Greg's start in online business was with the vc Asia Pacific Venture Technology Partners where he invested in new internet start ups. His firm notably passed on Hotmail (oops!) and invested in WebTV back in 94 - 95.
He decided he wanted to quit helping others get rich and jumped onboard with a reverse auction website called liquidprice (now gone) where he pioneered tracking on banner advertisements for large clients.
There he "discovered" goto as a great source of inexpensive traffic (goto of course inspired the billion dollar text ad distributor we know as Google).
Next he moved to nexttag - a comparison shopping doing 12 million in revenue. He moved it into the 100 million dollar range through his work in home and garden and then managed all of consumer goods for them.
He got recruited then by Become, which asked him "if you could build a comparison shopping from the ground up what would you do differently..."
He's been there 2 years come February :)
Greg Haslam's role at Become
As Sr. Director, Sales, Greg handles merchant relationships and business development relationships with companies that enhance user experience on the site.
Become growth since last year
Last year they had 500 merchants, 5 million products, and their best selling merchant did 10 orders a day.
Now they're at 5000 merchants, list more than 20,000,000 products while their top merchant does orders in the 1,000s a day.
why the growth in sales through Become?
Successful comparison shopping engines are highly leveraged on search engines - both in paid and organic results.What's rocking at Become this season
Last year we were primarily on yahoo. Now we're on yahoo, google, ask, msn - and we're getting very high quality traffic from MSN. And then of course there's organic search growth - the longer you're out there the more traffic you have.
Also we have a very strong retention rate there are lots of people returning back to us.
the Become business model and CPC vs. CPA
Apparel is huge. Especially shoes. Companies that let you return shoes for free is a very compelling online model and conversion rates are phenomenal.
Home and garden is big too - it's broad. Kitchen appliances are really moving - in the summer it was DIY home improvement items.
Electronics are evergreen.
We have distribution through bill me later - we power their shopping site with a selected section of our merchants on a rev share basis.The latest Become innovations
We're very similar to shopping.com/nextag/ in that we charge on a cpc basis. We found that to be very effective.
The challenge with cpa is that there's no incentive to merchants to clean up their feeds. With cpc merchants have to scrutinize their feeds and that gives the consumer a better experience.
Further, we have an account management team that works with our merchants to make sure their feeds are optimized.
There are different cpcs for different categories - people can increase their bids and get more exposure. We also factor in click through rate and have a merchant score. Our main goal is to provide a better user/consumer experience.
new features - search by color - an algo designed by a blind engineer.So, thanks to Greg for bending my ear on Thursday and filling us all in on what's happening at Become.com. And, Jason, Greg says hi :)
fast feed - the industry standard is that once a merchant updates a feed it takes 24 hours before it's reflected on the site.
We're able to update in 20 minutes after merchants make that change.
We've coupled this with sku based reporting - how every single product delivers leads, so they can figure out what sales are for that product
If they sell out, or sell through we can have it down from the site in 20 minutes.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 03:06 PM
Permanent Link: Become.com's 2005 vs. 2006: a Chat with Greg Haslam
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