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BizReport : Research : September 28, 2007
Are shoppers leaving comparison sites behind?
A recent survey from UK-based Quidco indicates that shoppers are changing they way they shop online. One in three UK users have stopped using the sites altogether. Does that mean shopping comparison sites will soon be gone from the web?
Not necessarily. But before we get to that, let's take a deeper look at the survey results.
Researchers found that 47% of those surveyed were "put off" by results that they perceived as being biased. About 33% of users go directly to a shopping website rather that comparison shopping beforehand and 70% begin their online shopping with a visit to a search engine.
What these results seem to indicate is that shoppers are changing the way they look at online shopping. Mike Brown is with HealthPricer, a comparison shopping engine (CSE). He says CSE's need to ensure the information advertised on the site is the same information users will find when they log on to a merchant site.
"Users want the best price or the best merchant ratings or quality customer service. They want to see the sort and display of results in the sequence they request not because a marketer paid the most to be there," he said. "Consumers are giving us feedback that they want honesty of results. Web 2.0 is all about the consumer."
To get the best results, he suggests crawling websites rather than relying on feeds. By crawling, CSE's can look at etailing sites daily for the latest deals.
Tags: ecommerce, etailing, online shopping
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Comments
Most comparison engines who know what they're doing (Shopzilla, etc.), update the listings several times a day. Last I checked, Shopzilla updates their listings at least 6 times per day with the most recent info provided to them from the merchant site. That leaves very little possibility for discrepancies in prices between a CSE and a merchant site. I believe the other CSE's operate similar to Shopzilla in that manner. Consumers should know this.
Posted by: hud on September 28, 2007 18:30