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I spent some time a few days ago talking to a WebData salesperson at Expertelligence. We spoke in length about the plans to develop WebData further. Here's a few highlights from our conversation:
1) WebData is by no means a finished product. It is only 8-9 months old and work on it is a continuous process.
2) As far as the shopping section of Webdata goes, the company realizes that it is somewhat difficult to use at this point. I pointed out the problems with the flights section in particular, and I was assured that EXGP is working with the airlines to enable flight data and pricing to retrieved more easily.
3) One thing that I asked about was the method Webdata uses to compare pricing on various goods. I mentioned that I thought Webdata would be more user friendly if an individual could pull up pricing on an item from all sources at once. The prices would all be on the same screen, enabling quick and easy comparisons.
According to the salesman, the technology to do this is in place; however, there is some internal debate about whether it should be done. Right now, all pricing searches are done with the full consent of the companies involved. EXGP gets a commission every time someone clicks through their site to purchase an item from a client. Moreover, many of these companies advertise on EXGP. The fear is that pricing would become too transparent if done in the fashion I suggested, and piss off the clients to the point where they pull advertising and are unwilling to pay EXGP for links.
I also mentioned that they need to add many more search possibilities to their various shopping categories. There are only a few sites listed under computers, for instance, even though 10s of sites that fall under that category exist. The salesman agreed, and said they were constantly working on adding more sites as they develop agreements with new companies.
I pointed out that sooner or later an extremely user friendly engine is going to come along that provides customers with the cheapest pricing across the entire web. This site will see monstrous traffic and earn much larger advertising revenues than EXGP currently does. This company will be the AMZN or YHOO equivalent in this service, because it will be the trailblazer. No-one will use EXGP then, because it will be an inferior product. The salesman reminded me that they are aware of the issues, have the technology in place to be that company and are currently debating the pros and cons internally. Personally, I think they should risk sacrificing their current relationships for much higher traffic, but I would like to hear other views.
3) EXGP is working hard to expand their database resources to make them easily available to anyone. One of their goals is to make the site a resource base for a number of easily accessible free databases. Let's say you wanted to have a dictionary available while you were working on Word, for instance. EXGP is developing a way that you'd be able to create a link directly to the dictionary from Word, thus eliminating the hassle of going through a process every time you want to look something up. This technology sounds pretty unique and it will be interesting to monitor.
4) Finally, I asked the salesman what they were planning to do about advertising since so few people know about EXGP. He mentioned that they were pursuing traditional routes and were currently in discussions with major engines to figure out mutually beneficial ways to get their name into the market.
Overall, it sounds like things are progressing well at EXGP. I was considering selling, but was reassured for the moment about their prospects. We'll see what develops with the company in the near future. In the meantime, I like to hear people's views about the route EXGP should take with their shopping section; in fact, I bet EXGP would appreciate input, also.
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