ON AN IMPORTANT STEP FORWARD IN ECOMMERCE

TRY, TRY AGAIN

Saul Hansell of the New York Times has a great piece on the long-standing gap between the idealism and reality of ecommerce and advertising online.  Here's how he discusses the situation to date:

"...there has been a sadly predictable transition as idealism morphs into the cruel realities of running a business.
The comparison shopping engines, like ComputerESP (bought by CNet’s Shopper.com) and BizRate (now part of ShopZilla), stopped displaying things in the order that most favored consumers with the lowest prices or whatever else the consumer wanted first.
Instead, they tried to find ways to favor advertisers, like listing paying customers first or simply ignoring sites that didn’t pay for access."

This retrospective is important context for an important step that real-estate site Zillow is taking, to try and move the slider more towards the consumer from the advertiser.  The piece goes on to describe this as follows:

"Enter Rich Barton, the latest techno-idealist hoping to revolutionize the mortgage market. Mr. Barton, who founded the Expedia travel service while at Microsoft, knows a bit about online shopping, and he is now the founder and chief executive of Zillow, the real estate valuation site.

Zillow got a lot of attention by analyzing real estate sales records and other public data to publish estimated sale values for many millions of homes in the country. Then it started aggregating listings of homes for sale (not charging the homeowner or real estate agent for the publicity). And now it is getting into the mortgage shopping business.

Mr. Barton is hoping to create a system that offers actual rates for their situation, as LendingTree does, without the sales hassle."

The piece does a great job of describing the nitty gritty of how Zillow's proposed process is markedly better than the one used by Lending Tree, in terms of preserving the privacy of the consumer as they shop between mortgage offers from lenders competing for their business WITHOUT KNOWING THEIR SPECIFIC CONTACT AND ID INFORMATION.

This is a big difference, and a relatively unique step forward in online commerce in any category.  There are a lot of reasons why this initiative by Zillow may not work, but the effort being made by the company is a notable step in itself.

Comments

[Albuquerque real estate]

You know, I noticed that recently (about those comparison shopping sites). Thanks for bringing that to light for everyone.

[Matt]

There is a big confusion between privacy, annoyance, transparency, in the real estate market.

You cannot provide mortgage rates to the consumer without information from the consumer