Call it “synergy”, if you must. Two trends—online shopping and local search—come together in Oodle.com, which aggregates local classified ad listings across a number of categories and makes them available to online shoppers in a specific area. The engine launched beta sites for three metro areas in late March and now operates in 22 cities, with the ability to reach 40% of the U.S. population.
CEO Craig Donato, a veteran of Web portal Excite, says the inspiration grew out of his own efforts to furnish a mountain cabin using classified ads and the realization of how fragmented that effort became. “I was struck with how most of the things happening with classifieds were seller-focused, in terms of making them fancier, cheaper or easier to buy,” he says. “As a buyer, I had problems that weren’t being addressed. I wanted to see everything that was out there in my area and to find what I was looking for quickly.”
Classifieds shoppers also have also a greater need to be advised quickly when something comes on the market, because buying from classifieds often requires more research than buying from a retailer. Pricing is elastic—How much does a used couch go for?—so shoppers want to get a broad view of what’s available; they usually have a spending limit but don’t go in with a specific price in mind, because that will depend on the condition of the goods. And inventory is equally fluid; the specific item may not be available right at the moment, forcing them to monitor the market regularly until their item comes up for sale.
Oodle.com works in the trading space below eBay, which has established a national market for rare or one-of-a-kind items such as collectibles. Sites like eBay have brought a critical mass of shoppers online in most cities, but those shoppers are still often looking for items that they want to see before they buy, or that they want to pick up in person rather than paying for delivery. “You’re not going to buy a ladder on eBay,’ Donato says. “A local perspective on this is long overdue.” For those purchases, the local classified aggregated by Oodle may be a better solution.
Oodle.com gets its listings from a combination of sources: local papers, both major metro and suburban; existing vertical ad sites such as Monster.com for jobs and Cars.com; and Craigslist, the popular online listing service for everything from roommates to romance. The search engine also gets a data feed from eBay and a dozen other sources. If local classified providers allow their content to be indexed by search engine, Oodle gets it that way; otherwise, it’s done by submission. Oodle does not accept ads on its own.
“There are plenty of people out there representing sellers,” Donato says. “Our niche in the vertical search ecology is to deliver qualified prospects. For all the e-commerce players out there, an engine like Shopping.com helps buyers by providing a consolidated view of the market, then delivers the right buyers to the right marketplace. They’re not a retailer; they provide a service for retailers. We’re doing exactly that with classifieds. We don’t sell ads; we expose a market.”
“There are thousands of sources out there for things like apartments, cars, or jobs,” says Faith Sedlin, marketing director for Oodle.com. “I think that a lot of buyers are not even aware of how many outlets there are on the Web for these ads. So there’s a need for a service that culls the categories and extracts all the local content that a customer might be interested in.”
Donato claims Oodle.com has rebuilt the classifieds to make them more usable from a buyer’s perspective. The company aggregates listings from a full range of local urban and suburban newspapers, as well as specialized sites such as Monster.com and Cars.com and a data feed from eBay. Users in Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia can now go to one location on the Web to find anything from a pet to a housecleaner. Proprietary technology also lets them get as specific as they want about their requirements. Users can search not just for a pet but for a female Chihuahua less than a year old; not just a car but a red 2001 Mini Cooper with less than 20,000 miles on the odometer.
The search engine also lets users create alerts for products that may not be offered at that moment. “If I’m interested in a fiberglass kayak paddle, I can set an alert that notifies me the minute one is offered in my area, so I can jump on it,” Donato says. “That listing may only last a few minutes, so you want to be the first person to respond to that ad.”
Adding value like that is one way many vertical search engines can become more than mere aggregators of Web listings found elsewhere. For example, in addition to searching local jobs, Oodle.com also indexes local volunteer opportunities—something that can be difficult to find in a single place on the Web.
“It’s a natural outgrowth of our local focus, helping people know where the volunteer needs are in their area,” says Sedlin. “It’s also useful to sellers, because if your item doesn’t sell, we thought it would be great to have an easy way to find out what charitable organizations in your neighborhood accept different kinds of donations—including who picks up and who asks you to drop off.” Oodle has exerted some effort in its existing markets to go out and find out about charities that don’t get a lot of publicity, such as a program to give used bridesmaid’s dresses to underprivileged kids to re-fit as prom dresses.
Oodle.com also uses technology to keep its listings clean and useful to buyers, by detecting spam listings, removing duplication, pruning dead links and adding live ones where possible. The engine can also add detail, expanding those common abbreviations that can make reading apartment listings tougher than doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. If locations aren’t given for an item, Oodle extrapolates one from the seller’s phone number. Listings are kept fresh; most remain online only for a few days.
How willing are local newspapers to hand over access to their ad content, given that many are already seeing their classified ad revenues pinched by online services? Donato says that getting listings included on Oodle.com can actually drive buyers to a newspaper’s Web site and make their classified more useful to sellers.
That’s an argument that may have increasing traction with daily papers and assure Oodle.com of a continuous supply of fresh content. In late May, the Knight Ridder chain recently announced that it was dropping all fees for classified ads selling household merchandise on one of its online sites; the thinking is that visitors drawn to the site by those ads will make the site more valuable to advertisers who pay to offer other things, such as real estate, cars and jobs.
Right now, Oodle’s only established revenue stream is AdSense ads from Google appearing on the results pages. But Donato says the company eventually hopes to sell enhanced listings and other featured merchandising opportunities to sellers and will consider syndication arrangements with newspaper and locally driven Web sites.
