US shoppers turn to comparison shopping engines

Rather than solely relying on an online ad campaign, e-tailers may benefit this holiday shopping season from comparison shopping engine results. According to a new report from Hitwise, traffic to comparison shopping engines increased 13% year over year.

by Kristina Knight

"Consumers are beginning to research potential gift purchases and compare prices earlier than last year especially with retailers beginning to roll out seasonal promotions,” said Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise.

The report finds that search engines drive the most traffic to comparison engines; searches for laptop computers, video games/systems and LCD televisions are among the highest searched items. Baby boomers are leading the way to comparison engines in the US with a 38% increase in traffic for users over 45 years of age.

What is really interesting about the report, which is based on American shoppers' habits, is that comparison engine traffic in the UK is seeing nearly opposite effects. In the UK, shoppers say they are put off by results from shopping engines that they consider "biased". This is leading to a slump in traffic to these sites.

To ensure that users feel that results are organic, comparison shopping engines need to actually crawl retailer websites for the latest information. E-tailers, on the other hand, need to ensure that comparison shopping engines have the latest information and must ensure that the results from a shopping engine match the ad copy within their website.