Comparison shopping engine and e-commerce services firm Shopzilla Inc. has acquired mobile commerce technology provider Zappli Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Zappli offers two primary products: InstaBuy and myShopanion. InstaBuy enables consumers to check out with just one click. MyShopanion is a social shopping mobile app. The entire Zappli team has joined Shopzilla, and Zappli’s co-founder and CEO, Philippe Suchet, has become the chief strategy officer at Shopzilla.
“Zappli has spent many years focused on understanding mobile usability and solving some of the big problems, specifically the friction associated with the checkout process,” Shopzilla CEO Bill Glass tells Internet Retailer. “While they have focused on mobile, their technology certainly applies more broadly to all devices. Shopzilla has a long history as an authority in online retail and a broad and growing portfolio of properties and commerce-related platforms. Given the tens of millions of consumers we touch every month, you can imagine the opportunities for leveraging Zappli’s solutions and expertise across the Shopzilla audience base to greatly improve consumer shopping experiences and deliver even better conversion and ROI for our retailer partners.”
Shopzilla plans to integrate Zappli’s technology into Shopzilla’s mobile sites and apps to ease mobile checkout, Glass says.
“In the short term, we will bring to market transformative mobile and desktop experiences that will allow consumers to find the best prices at thousands of leading retailers, and complete purchases in just seconds,” he says. “When fully integrated, we will have created a seamless shopping experience across all devices, and consumers will enjoy a greatly simplified path from product discovery to price comparison to closing the transaction.”
Shopzilla reaches a global audience of more than 40 million shoppers each month through its sites, apps and affiliate network, the company says. Shopzilla connects shoppers with more than 100 million products from tens of thousands of retailers, it says. The company’s online shopping brands in the U.S. and Europe include Bizrate, Beso, Shopzilla, Retrevo, RobotOatmeal, PrixMoinsCher and SparDeinGeld, as well as a group of B2B businesses including Bizrate Insights, Shopzilla Publisher Program, and a display and audience targeting division, Aisle A.
Shopzilla offers apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones. Curiously, it does not offer a mobile-optimized web site.
“Bizrate is our largest site in comparison shopping; therefore, we prioritized our mobile web efforts there first so we can learn how best to leverage the traffic and then roll out a similar version on Shopzilla,” a Shopzilla spokeswoman says. “We expect to launch a mobile web version of Shopzilla later this year.”
Shopzilla declines to reveal mobile traffic figures, but says mobile traffic is a meaningful percentage of total traffic and is growing rapidly.
“App downloads and usage represent a new consumer engagement pattern altogether and is one that is not very big for us yet,” Glass adds. “That said, we see huge opportunity there and that is what drove both our interest in Zappli and our current level of significant investment in apps for both comparison shopping and product discovery.”
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