Shopping.com made waves by choosing to not accept new applications from merchants from October 24th to December 31st of 2007. This was presumably because Shopping.com grew too fast for their staff to keep up with the new applications. Shopping.com (which owns DealTime.com) has seen a spike in traffic quite more than ShopZilla.com (which owns BizRate.com) and PriceGrabber (which also feeds to quite a few other sites).
Now it appears that the damage is being spilled over to the current merchants as well. Contact requests are not being responded to for weeks, and their phone number responds to merchants by telling them to first hold, then they’re given the option to leave a message or hold, and finally leave a message or hang up; all within the span of a minute. Shopping.com has no intention of answering the phone.
This reminds me of the concept of sustainable growth. Shopping.com grew, but could not keep up with that growth and faces the withdrawal of its merchants. This does not bode well for them, especially given the case of click fraud where, given no response from Shopping.com, the frustrated merchant’s only option is to pull the plug.
Tags: Shopping.com