23 Musings

Interesting opinions here from Phillip Wilkinson of Crowdstorm fame (ex Kelkoo chief) gives his opinions on what is happening with the Kelkoo / Yahoo rumours I posted about the other week.

Always good to hear from an insider, especially one who understands the game so well!

Apparently Yahoo is considering offloading Kelkoo, the comparison shopping service. I'm not surprised at all!

Kelkoo was a major force in comparison shopping a few years ago, it was the place to go if you wanted a new electrical item or consumable and you could very quickly search multiple online retailers for the best price. Now though, comparison shopping sites are becoming much more focused and social in their interaction with users. Most sites now focus on certain products where as Kelkoo always tried to be the jack of all trades. Other sites are focusing on the crowd by allowing users to share good deals and recommend offers to each other.

I my opinion Kelkoo hasn't advanced at all in the last few years. I've listed in their travel section for a while and it's consistently the worst performing comparison shopping site we use. Their online travel offering is really pretty useless and they are soundly beaten by other sites like Travel Supermarket.

Yahoo paid 475M Euros for Kelkoo in 2004. I'd be really surprised if it could command that much today, yes it has the traffic but the functionality is lacking. Yahoo is looking at other options and may make Kelkoo more independent or try to improve it, but I reckon they'd be better off starting from scratch or getting rid!