Comparison shopping engines should really be thought of as meta-search engines. Let's say you're going to look for a new speaker. If you knew the site (or maybe if you did a search in Yahoo and clicked on an ad), you might go to a site like Crutchfield.com or you might end up somewhere else. What's authoritative? Who has the best price? Who knows? If you do a search at Shopzilla or Yahoo! Shopping, then there are a couple of advantages: 1) You get to see prices from many vendors at once and 2) You get to see the vendors rated by users. I think the market has room for both: we need meta-search engines to find sites when we don't know the space. When we do know the space, we might go directly to a site we trust to make a purchase (but even still, we might check the meta-search engine to see if there's a better price).

Regarding the saturation, I’m not sure I totally agree. The point that your hitting here is that there doesn’t seem to be a "superior engine."

I think one of the fundamental issues is that when shopping engines are compared to search, search results are driven by merchant feeds rather than a combination of human suggested links and crawler data. The end result being a Hodge Podge of mixed merchants that have similar propositions and cut throat pricing.

When compared to search, the sheer amount of sites crawled combined with sophisticated algorithms make for a much more comprehensive product.

The market may be saturated, however, I believe that it is still in its infancy. The war grounds just haven’t been identified as you had described above. And by that I mean, what features of shopping engines really get the consumer excited and could leverage loyalty:

1. Amount of merchants (Like the size of a search engine index?)
2. How fast the search was completed?
3. How relevant the search results are and does price factor in this model?
4. Filtering tools?
5. Other?

I don’t think we have a clear winner...yet. I find myself constantly using multiple engines to find the best deal. In the meantime, I’ll keep waiting for the perfect engine:)

Christian

I don't think the problem with Pronto is necessarily the toolbar, but perhaps the over intrusive integration with my browsing experience. It appears too much like spyware programs that generate similar contextually driven pop ups.

The shopping comparison engine field seems crowded but it will continue to grow until a few clear leaders emerge. As it stands it is still a bit of the Wild West out there. I think it will remain crowded and undifferentiated until we have a few clear winners.

I don’t the market is saturated – no where near, actually. We run a niche comparison shopping site specifically for health related items and things are good. It seems to us that the comparison shopping visitor is either comparing products, or prices. Though our focus is more on the consumer knowing exactly what he/she wants and conversion is high.

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