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Overstock’s Google Problem: Link Attack Or Shopping Hack?
Either way, it’s an ingenious way of hacking the Web to squeeze out a little more business—and Tarazz, as middle man, can grab a piece of every sale it helps produce.
No wonder Google wasn’t happy. To Google’s analytics, Tarazz looked exactly like a giant link farm. The problem is that Tarazz wasn’t selling links. It was just an online middle man of the sort Google wasn’t designed to handle well.
What’s probably most frustrating about Tarazz is that it’s a genuinely clever idea for dealing with a real problem. When it comes to retail, the World Wide Web involves a very fragmented world. Cross-border retail is a pain at best for retailers. For customers, it’s miserable. Even when a retailer offers an E-Commerce site aimed at a particular foreign country, the retailer may still not let customers pay in local currency. And that’s assuming the retailer is willing to handle the complications of cross-border tariffs and shipping.
Compare that with Tarazz, which handles currency changes, import requirements and all the dirty details. For customers, it’s much simpler and probably only a little more expensive. For U.S. retailers, it’s most likely an annoyance at worst—retailers are getting business from a Web portal on the other side of the world that might be misusing the retailer’s trademarks and copyrights but is beyond convenient legal reach. Everybody wins—or at least comes out a bit ahead.
Enter Google—and suddenly Tarazz goes from minor annoyance to major pain point for Overstock.
The millions of links appear to be gone now. Maybe Overstock’s cease-and-desist letters had the desired effect, and scared the portal into changing how it worked. Or maybe Tarazz just figured that if it annoys too many major retailers, it’ll be out of business.
But the problem Tarazz is trying to solve is still there. Big retailers have a hard time handling a relatively small number of customers on the other side of the world. The Internet, which is supposed to be able to connect any seller with any buyer, doesn’t do a very good job on its own.
As long as that’s true, middle men like Tarazz will keep popping up to take up the slack—assuming Google doesn’t beat up every retailer that gets caught in the middle.
-Marc
March 3rd, 2011 at 11:16 am
Hmmm. Sounds like it worked almost perfectly–innovative internet company comes up with an ingenious solution, but one that causes an unforeseen consequence. The unforeseen consequence raises a red flag which is apparently acted on quickly by creating a new ingenious solution.
The only thing that would make this better is if Google (“Do no Evil”) wouldn’t announce “slap-downs” on companies without allowing for a little more research into the problem. If Overstock.com had been given time to investigate further and get Tarazz to make it changes before Google “outed” Overstock.com, it would have been “no harm, no foul”.