1. Shopping.com had a record quarter with 24.3 million unique visitors.
2. Not only is Shopping.com #1 in the US, it’s also #1 in Australia.
3. eBay’s ad revenue growth was up 50% Y/Y, due primarily to Shopping.com, according to eBay.

Now for a free side tip: eBay’s relationship with Yahoo on “null” search results is completely non-material to their earnings.

Source: SeekingAlpha. If you don’t know about SeekingAlpha, and want to keep up on public companies, it’s a virtual gold mine.

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Brian Mark talks about how he made $1M from Google Base leads in 2006 to his website. I think it’s safe to say that if you aren’t on Base yet, you should be.

If you aren’t, your competitors already are.

In case you missed the memo, Google Base is becoming more and more every day the preferred way to interact with Google. I predict even SiteMaps and those types of things will eventually fall away. Why have two ways to get your content to Google?

Incidentally, here is another Base tidbit while I’m at it. A real estate solution is now starting to allow its clients to send their properties directly into Google Base.

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Here’s a interesting tidbit from the eBay Q4 results this week.

There’s more traded on eBay UK per head of population - about £50 a year each - than anywhere else, including the USA.

You are probably already aware that eBay (EBAY) was up about 18% yesterday [January 24] including after-market trading, but what you probably didn’t know is that eBay gets more business per capita from Britain than any other country in the world, including the U.S. Approximately $98 per year is traded per person per year on eBay in the United Kingdom.

Pretty impressive! As our American colleagues would say - “Way to go, Brits!”!!

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Apparently in December 2006 (according to Nielsen/NetRatings), Nextag was the #3 Web advertiser, beating out the likes eBay, even.

I have a feeling that Nextag’s margins aren’t as high as eBay’s so this was a costly endeavor. They were the only comparison shopping vendor in the Top 10.

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Cybersource has just released their annual fraud report for the UK and, as always, it makes interesting reading. For those of you not familiar with Cybersource, they provide online payment solutions, such as fully automated credit/debit card processing services and sophisticated fraud prevention tools for merchants.

The survey included 150 respondents of which 50% were from retail sector. The majority of online revenues were in the £10m to £100m range.

Here are some highlights:

• One third predicted online revenue growth of over 50% for 2007

• 13% of respondents accept PayPal - 19% say they have plans to in 2007

• Customer service is No.1 concern, price competition is second, fraud is third

• Sales growth continues to outpace fraud - as a % of revenue, fraud has stalled or dropped for 84% of retailers

• Concerns that fraudsters will be more sophisticated in 2007, with identify theft being the key problem

• Only 36% of retailers have started the process of planning for PCI Compliance (June 2007) - and 40% currently have no plans to achieve compliance!

• Over-reliance on manual review continues - on average the respondents manually reviewed 1 in 3 orders!

• After June 30th 2007, retailers will be unable to accept Maestro online unless they have implemented Mastercard SecureCode functionality.

Helping retailers understand and automate fraud prevention continues to be a big focus for our team here at ChannelAdvisor and we plan to introduce new ways to do this in 2007. The good news is that users of ChannelAdvisor’s Merchant software platform can already take advantage of our built-in Cybersource integration in the US and UK.

UK blog readers - are you seeing the same trends as highlighted in the report? Let us know!

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