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Price ComparisonMulti-Item Price Comparison*** brain cramp *** I though someone did the following feature, but cannot remember who... heck, maybe everyone added this since last I looked... Do any of the shopping engines have price comparison for a user-defined bundle of products. Like, if I am shopping for a digital camera, a rare type of high-speed memory, lens, case, etc... is there any site that will let me see A) all the places where I can do 1-stop shopping/shipping B) sort by the aggregate price? I thought some sites even had a comparison option to see the price difference of lowest one-stop pricing vs. the cheapest individual offers for each product... names? links?
Multi-Item Price Comparison
Price Search EnginesWhile we are on the topic of price comparison... Of all the site suggestions that come my way, the most common are the price-check sites. I'm like the old woman who lived in a shoe, I have so many price-engine suggestions I don't know what to do. Not every site deserves its own post, but I do not want to sit on them, in case one of them proves to be extraordinary. So here you have it, a list of some popular price-only engines, their current rankings at Alexa, and a sample search for "sd500" (aCanon camera): #2,494 - Pricewatch - (sample search)
Price Search Engines
Study: Searchers Operating with Blunt Instruments51% of online adults use search engines for shopping (internetretailer.com) "Of 1,047 adults using search engines for shopping, 80% use it to compare prices, the study found." Yikes. I hope this does not mean what I think it means. (Search, Click, Back, Click, Back, Click, Back...) If people are routinely using general search engines to compare prices on popular products, they risk missing out in two ways: wasting time and missing out. For example, go to a price-comparison powerhouse like Shopzilla and you will find 113 offers for the Canon a95. Q: An ambitious shopper could compare all of these offers the hard way, one at a time, but who has that much time? Q: So by comparing only a fraction of the available offers, what are the odds a "manual shopper" will find the highest rated merchants and the lowest total price? (price + tax + shipping) Crikey, there is so much upside to comparison shopping that I can hardly sleep at night...
Study: Searchers Operating with Blunt Instruments
Price-Only Comparison Engines?How much of this is specific to PriceWatch, and how is an overall decline in demand for price-only comparison engines?
Price-Only Comparison Engines?
Study: Price Comparison May Lead to Higher PricesSo says a sassy summary of a study published in the March issue of Management Science. Researchers throw water on Internet comparison shopping (austin.bizjournals.com)
Where is my old library card? I might do the unthinkable and read the article before commenting. I mention this because Waleed Muhanna's website has several interesting-sounding studies, including "Search and Collusion in Electronic Markets" and "The Impact of E-Commerce on the Real Estate Industry" on the publications page. The first one is pending publication, but the second one is good to go. p.s. - I have to take issue with the title at BizJournals... "throw water" on comparison shopping? Just because one component of comparison shopping did not live up to some people's unrealistic expectations, which some would argue is a lower-order component anyway, we are to throw water, presumably dirty bathwater, on the baby that is comparison shopping? Objection... Sustained!
Study: Price Comparison May Lead to Higher Prices
Study: Pricing Advantages Linked to Customer ServiceThe conventional wisdom about the Internet continues to be re-written. "Gruca contends that the Internet is a convenience channel for consumers, rather than a price channel where items can be bought at the lowest price." source What would you rather use (or own, or work for, or invest in): a price-comparison engine or a shopping-convenience engine? I don't mind saving a few bucks, but even that has to be convenient. It is with that frame of mind that I do my research for Price Comparison Week: "real-world price comparison made easy" or something like that... it is much more than who has the lowest price.
Study: Pricing Advantages Linked to Customer Service
Price-Comparison Research: Online Retail Price Range is IncreasingThe New York Times has an article, Price-Comparison Sites Do the Legwork (free registration required), that details a reporter's experiences with price-comparison shopping, but the real meat of the article is the reference to Michael R. Baye, a business professor at Indiana University (plus collegues John Morgan of Berkley and Patrick Scholten of Bentley). Professor Baye studied 20 million(!) online price quotes on ~10,000 consumer-electronic products from various price-comparison sites. He says that over the last five years, the gap between the lowest prices and the highest prices has actually increased from 35% to 45%. You can find more information (and cool interactive charts) at Nash-Equilibrium.com.
Price-Comparison Research: Online Retail Price Range is Increasing
Is comparison shopping bad for Amazon.com?That is the question being asked by the Internet Stock Blog. Answer: yes, but not necessarily for the reason mentioned in this post. I could be wrong, but my feeling is that many (most?) of the people who are super-concerned with price differences have already found a favorite price comparison engine or two. Similar to the fear among advertisers that sooner or later everyone would get ad-blocking software. It could happen, but only if it came enabled by default on new computers (i.e. Norton). Growth rates cannot be extrapolated from the early adopters, if the rest of the market might not know enough or care enough to go down the same path. The mass market will need more hand-holding. For price comparison, this could happen if Froogle and Yahoo! Shopping get increased exposure on their parent search engines. Okay, now let's talk about the real threat. Background: I talk to a lot of people about their online shopping experiences. From the tech elite at industry conferences to Joe and Jane Surfer in middle America, I'm always asking some variation of the same question, "what is your process to search online for fuzzy blue widgets?" Not surprisingly, a decent percent of people start their search for books, music, videos, electronics, and other common consumer goods at Amazon.com. But not once has anyone cited lowest-price as their primary motivation. What keeps them coming back to Amazon? Reviews. Amazon.com is an irresistible "honeypot" to online shoppers because they have a critical mass of trusted reviews. In the words of Joe Shopper, "Where am I most likely to find enough good reviews on my product (any product) to get comfortable with my decision?" In the past, Amazon.com’s main competitor in this area was Epinions, now Shopping.com. These days, there is a new threat that casts a long shadow: Froogle. Last year, Google put the web on notice of a new philosophical direction when it unveiled aggregated product reviews. I was more than a little surprised at the ho-hum response to this development, when everyone is so gaga over Google. Maybe it is because Froogle still needs an extreme usability makeover. Nevertheless, this is a few tweaks away from being ground-breaking stuff. If Froogle goes on to become a shopping comparison powerhouse, we'll be able to look back and identify merchant reviews & product reviews as the turning point. Will this be the year that Google finally throws some resources at Froogle? p.s. - Internet Stock Blog - Ticker: SHOP is one for the bookmarks.
Is comparison shopping bad for Amazon.com?
Q&A with PriceGrabber.com's CEO at BusinessWeekBusinessWeek has a Q&A session with PriceGrabber CEO Kamran Pourzanjani. I have only one problem with this article. The main heading talks about a shopping aid, then the sub-heading uses the term price-comparison site, as if they were one and the same. Price comparison and shopping comparison are not synonymous. Price comparison is only one part in the big picture of shopping comparison. Admittedly, the site name includes the word price, and many people use it for price comparison, but PriceGrabber also includes feature finders, ratings and reviews. Industry insiders have said, "the percentage of people who sort by price is actually quite low." Patricia Seybold reported that price comparison was secondary to shopping activities such as product discovery and checking availability. If shoppers are looking beyond price comparison, we need to look beyond it, too. Anyway, the article is a nice summary of what is going on over at PriceGrabber, check it out.
Q&A with PriceGrabber.com's CEO at BusinessWeek
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