LocalPrice.com - Comparison Shopping for Local Goods and Services

There are a lot of companies out there to provide you contact with local service providers (ServiceMagic, the new Sears site, etc). Most of those have a similar model, though: Tell us what you want and give us your information and we'll give it to a bunch of people who will respond and you can take it from there. Those are good solutions if you're looking for a provider who can service your needs, but it definitely does not provide you much information about the person contacting you, pricing, etc. And in some of those situations, having less information that the person you're dealing with can really hurt you.

So today on Screenwerk, I saw an article about LocalPrice.com, a new company that's taking a new approach on things. They are currently only in Atlanta, but have a really interesting value proposition: They provide you information to compare local products or services up-front. Their model is more similar to a shopping engine model, and gives you a lot more information about the person you'll be contacting, pricing, etc. This really allows you to make a more educated decision and probably save yourself some money in the meantime. Their model depends on a lot of high-quality structed content, which is really going to be the bottleneck in their system (which is why its a good idea for them to focus on their starting market, Atlanta, before trying to expand too quickly), but that's also the strength of the system. It will be interesting to see how things go for them.

Price Comparisons of Atlanta Service Providers | LocalPrice.com

Sears Launches ServiceMagic Copy

Their hook, apparently, is that users will pay to list jobs, provide detailed project specs, and pre-screened contractors will bid on them. Long story short, I sincerely doubt this will ever get any kind of traction. Users don't want to pay for things they can get for free elsewhere and you're really trying to get them to decide on a provider based on price, when there are many more factors that are important to that kind of decision. Then, Sears wants to hold the money in escrow until everyone has agreed that things have been done to satisfaction, then will take 10% of the contractor's money? Sounds pretty bad on both ends...

Kelsey Group Blogs » Sears Launches ServiceLive, a Leads Site

ServiceMagic getting into SEM and site building

ServiveMagic announced an interesting acquisition today, buying a company called Market Hardware, which does websites and SEM for SMBs in some high-volume online verticals. This is going to be interesting, as it makes them more competitive to the IYPs and companies like ReachLocal who are all going after the same customers. I have to think that SM's stable of Lead customers will have huge potential to convert to SEM customers as well (and may shift their spend to SM from those other legacy providers). We'll see what happens...

Kelsey Group Blogs » IAC’s ServiceMagic Buys Market Hardware

Women are more likely than men to be IYP users

I saw an interesting tool on another website today (it can be found at the link below). You activate this tool and it will go through your browser history, analyze the sites you've visited, and tell you if it thinks you're male or female. When I ran it, it said with 100% probability that I'm male (I am). But more interesting to me was the male/female ratios it displayed for various IYP/Local sites I've visited. Here they are:

• Yellowpages.com - 0.72 male/female (1.38 women per man on that site)
• Yelp - 0.77
• Yellowbook - 0.8
• ServiceMagic - 0.71
• DexKnows - 0.79
• Google - 0.98

As someone working in the local space online, this tells me that, across the board, 55-57% of our users are women. That's without any specific outreach effort to that group. Perhaps we should consider market more directly to them, or at least focus on the sites they're using, as they seem more predisposed to using us to start with.

Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender