Mpire launches a new widget service today with over 75 different widgets aimed directly at eBay and Amazon affiliates. It’s a crowded space. On Sunday Michael Arrington described it well with a post aptly titled “The Attack of the Advertising Widgets“. A natural first reaction is what? more widgets! I caught up with Mpire CEO Matt Hulett and Co-Founder Dave Cotter earlier in the week and it’s a question I had to ask. After a decent 30 minutes I found there was a lot to like about Mpire’s new widget offering, and some great potential. Yes, more widgets, but these ones are different. The defining feature that makes Mpire widgets stand out from the crowd is dynamically grouped content. The widgets incorporate Mpire’s meta-shopping data, creating shopping trend results across 15 categories, including entertainment, sports, fashion, technology, games and youth/teens. A widget can list and link to the top searches at eBay for a particular topic, for example Baseball. A widget covering fashion can provide a dynamically updated price watch chart. For lovers of Second Life, one widget provides updates of Linden Dollar average sales prices from eBay. The new widgets have been in private beta testing prior to today’s launch and can boast of some significant results. On average in testing, CTR rates with Mpire’s widgets were up to 5 times higher than a comparable banner or Adsense unit. The new widgets are completely free, and surprisingly do not require registration (although it is an option). Affiliates simply insert their affiliate code when setting up the widget and get to keep 100% of all profits made. There’s no revenue sharing model and affiliates deal directly with eBay and Amazon for payment. I asked Hulett and Cotter the obvious question: where’s the return? We’ve covered Mpire previously here and here. As well as offering an on site shopping comparison service, Mpire also have a browser plugin that provides comparative shopping data. The aim of the widgets from a corporate view point is to drive awareness and traffic back to the core product. What better way of getting your name out there than having thousands of people running widgets that include your company name and link in the footer! The only draw back I could find from a publishers view point was a lack of dynamic contextual delivery. Much like AuctionAds (a TechCrunch sponsor), the widgets are delivered contextually only to → Read More

When shopping meta-search engine Mpire launched their Firefox shopping plugin last year we felt it was one of the best shopping tools to come out in a while. Today, Mpire is offering the plugin for IE7, upgraded their site and launched the newly established Mpire Lab’s first product, a visual shopping site called Shopwave. Mpire is also working with Electric Sheep and Linden Lab to integrate their shopping experience into SecondLife and on an Apollo version that will carry out automated shopping searches. The revamped site features a cleaner layout along with the same Farecast-style price tracking of the old one, but now includes Amazon and Epinion reviews along with coupons and deals embedded in the search results. The new Shopwave site is a work in progress that tackles the lack of innovation going on in online shopping visualization. We’ve talked about a couple new visualization ideas before. Mpire’s Shopwave doesn’t have as extreme a layout as BrowseGood’s treemap visualization, or as customizable as Like.com’s color and shape driven engine. It instead takes a window shopping approach, where you know what category you want, but maybe not the exact product. If you don’t know exactly how to describe what you’re looking for, Mpire’s new image previews may be worth the thousand words you can’t find. → Read More

We’ve been getting “just in time for the holidays” pitches for coverage from quite a few shopping sites lately but Seattle based number crunchers Mpire have come out with one of the best new shopping products I’ve seen yet. The company’s site launched in June of this year. It compares prices on items for sale at a list of online retailers and tracks eBay auction prices for items over time. The graph acts (and looks) like Farecast airfare predictions, but for past auction price trends. Today’s new Mpire product is a browser plug-in that pops up when looking at an item on any of several hundreds of 3rd party shopping sites and provides you cross-retailer data, related deals and coupons around the web and a fetching graph of eBay final auction sale prices rising or falling for your item over time. The screen shot following this post is fuzzy and small, click on it to open a full sized version in a new window. The plug-in, which will be available later this afternoon, is for Firefox only right now. Hopefully they will be able to offer an IE version as well. Update: It’s available now. A browser plug-in may be the missing ingredient to drive substantial use of this very interesting product; a destination site was far more inconvenient to use. Beside the full display on the bottom of your screen, the plug-in also displays new and used prices for an item on supported sites right next to the site’s native price display. Damon Darlin of the New York Times was disappointed in Mpire’s search results in an article last week; good search is part of the challenge but making a comparison shopping tool easy and compelling to use is a huge challenge as well. I think Mpire has done a very nice job of that. → Read More