Shopping.com Reviews

Pros

- is part of big eBay and leverages eBay technology but has as well the advantages of a small company (about 120 people in SF)

- never a dull moment

- fun culture (new hire lunch, show&tell sessions, great parties, etc.)

Cons

- lots of changes in management recently (hopefully for the better)

- new direction (distributed commerce) is promising but not yet 100% clear

Advice to Senior Management

Work closer together with eBay technology folks and do not reinvent the wheel

Pros

Family like environment, bright people, lots of team building and day-to-day perks to make work easier for the employees.

Cons

Passive Aggressive cultural tendencies amongst some of the old timers and a resistance to make changes. When there is agreement, execution can be slow and generally there is lots of complaining behind the scene.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep-up the call to action - insist on a more positive, "can do" attitude from folks and require top management to make the difficult choices as needed when there is a lack of performance!

Pros

Hands on
Open and honest
Great challenges to solve

Cons

Tough category
Need for more talents

Advice to Senior Management

Be bold

Pros

I've been working for Shopping.com for the last few years and I can say the company is making more changes and pushing for innovation more than ever in the past. The company defined its strategy and vision a few years ago and since keeps pushing to achieve it. The leadership team keeps challenging us to rethink our business a find ways to re-invent the way people shop online.
The CEO (Andre Haddad) manages to establish an open environment where every employee is informed about everything that is going on with the company and is very open to listen.
I like the people around me. The product team is very strong and organized.

Cons

Wish we could have move faster in some areas. Though as I wrote above we are moving faster than ever in the past.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep challenging and pushing us. There is a great conviction in the company that we are going in the right direction and we should all leverage this to get to even higher results.

Pros

Surrounded by very smart and innovative people who thrive to do their best in building a world class product to server the customers. Team work, professionalism, winning spirit, and customer focus. innovative and latest technologies to work with.

Cons

Office location. Very challenging market space. You need to be ready to tackle tough technical problems. Time to market pressure.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue your focus on solving tough consumer problems and in creating the most helpful shopping site. Would like to see more reviews, alerts and community activities on your site.

Pros

Small, energetic team that keeps it human, is honest and direct, lots of cool people. Recent customer focus is very motivating

Cons

Tough business context, lots of competition. Some employees not very engaged

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the focus on the customer, take bigger risks and make sure all employees are on board

Pros

Small place to make an impact and get recognized. Easy and friendly people, great bay view, fun place. Small teams size too.

Cons

Going through a turnaround, may see projects being re-prioritized often. Has seen lots of employee churn lately, many positions open.

Advice to Senior Management

Stick to the execution plan strictly and show results. Keep the act fast, run fast spirit alive and kicking well.

Pros

Very nice environment to work and lot of experienced people.

Cons

Less growth after some time

Advice to Senior Management

Be more confident

Pros

you get a paycheck and some health benefits.
parking.
you aren't expected to work too hard, or put in too many hours. 10-5:30pm (6pm at the latest) with a 1 to 2 hour lunch if you feel like it.

Cons

there are 2 many to list here, but a few are:

- Incompetent management who mostly care about people filling seats and "pretending" they're improving the business through short projects that try to improve NPS.

- All of their competitors have a much better business because their sites perform very fast. Shopping.com has set the benchmark for completely irrelevant searches that take forever to load.

- Even knowing this, management still can't listen to advice from engineers, only product managers... and in the end, these projects only fall short of a vastly pathetic goal.

- They waste their time identifying issues that really are non-issues, and at the same time, don't spend any time with the real issues - improving site architecture and performance.

- If you argue with your inexperienced (but promoted) manager, too much, he'll try to put you on a performance plan, all the while making excuses of what you did wrong, except, there's no real evidence...

- Management gets off on their own pep talks ... you should give a shout out to the eBay CEO who comes to do the cheer-leading and curse "f$ck" and "sh$t" during his speech!! very classy!!

- people who work hard and try to lead end up getting snuffed by insecure, jealous managers who can't even answer the question, "what do you do?" .. except to say "I have no idea".

Advice to Senior Management

Move the company to eBay and get rid of those Shopping.com managers !!! get some new ones !!! Better yet, promote your senior engineers to be the managers!!!

Pros

Many of the employees are talented and very helpful.
Parking.

Cons

Management has no clue how to build or maintain a large software project. Best talent is wasted. Very ugly micromanagement. Managers annoy people with their check points. They want to be cool observers, march around the floor, control the work of their subordinates, do very little listening. They can stop by at any time with their "hey, where we at?" No group has any clue what any other group is doing. Highly political atmosphere.

Advice to Senior Management

Slow down the release cycle, reward and recognize people