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Shopping search has grown up. Once simple product search and price comparison engines now offer sophisticated tools designed to assist with all aspects of the shopping cycle.
Overall, shopping search engines are far superior to general purpose web search engines if you're looking to research and buy products. This superiority comes in part because shopping search engines take advantage of the structure of online product catalogs, with clearly identified characteristics such as price, description, features and so on.
But shopping search now also provides a lot of valuable information that's simply beyond the capabilities of general search tools. Things like consumer reviews, merchant ratings, lists of the most popular products, total prices that include tax and shipping -- all of these features are designed not only to help you find the best deal, but to help you research and compare products well before you're ready to buy.
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, more than 21 million online users visited specialized comparison shopping sites in August 2003 at work and at home. This represents an annual traffic growth rate of between 55% and 81% for the most popular shopping search engines.
Four players have emerged as the clear leaders in the space. Shopping.com (formerly DealTime) is the clear traffic leader, with nearly 12 million unique visits in August as measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. BizRate was a distant second, with a still respectable 6 million visitors, followed by NexTag with 4.6 million and Pricegrabber with 3.9 million visitors.
The traffic increases are attributable to a number of factors. First, e-commerce activity is booming, with more than $80 billion in sales (including travel) expected for 2003, says Safa Rashtchy, an internet analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. And despite the massive traffic garnered by giants Amazon and eBay, the majority of the shopping activities are conducted outside these two sites.
Users have grown more sophisticated, using the web for both research and to buy products. The major shopping search sites all offer varying degrees of product information, comparison tools, reviews, seller ratings and other features, in addition to extensive price lists.
Shopping search sites have also been aggressive at traffic acquisition, through the use of banner ads, sponsored listings as well as strategic partnerships. For example, Pricegrabber powers the product search at Ask Jeeves, and BizRate powers Lycos Shopping.
All of this activity has been a boon for both searchers and merchants. It's now possible to get nearly perfect information about products and prices, giving buyers unprecedented power in the purchasing process. And rather than fearing such complete disclosure, merchants are finding that lowest price isn't the most important consideration for most buyers. Service, reputation and other factors are key differentiators that are key components of the buying decision making process.
Don't Forget Shopping Portals
While our primary focus this week is on "pure" shopping search services, we'll also be taking a look at the search efforts of the major online retailers. eBay and Amazon are the goliaths, attracting 43 million and 26 million unique visitors in August.
Yahoo's recently revamped shopping property is also a leader, drawing nearly 16 million users in August, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Yahoo is also blurring the lines between shopping and web search, often returning a link to its shopping property as the top result for product-related web searches.
AOL and MSN also have popular shopping services, drawing 7.5 million and 5 million users, respectively, in August.
There are also a number of other shopping search services that are worth your attention. We've provided descriptions and links to these in the Shopping Search Engines section of Search Engine Watch.
Tomorrow, I'll be taking a look at the changes and enhancements that have been made to the major shopping search players over the past year. On Wednesday, I'll look at how search is playing an increasingly important role at the major online retailers. Thursday will feature brief writeups of other notable shopping search services, with links to selected articles about shopping search from the past year.
Search Headlines
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication's search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.
