News is coming out that online comparison shopping sites are growing in use.
As a consumer, I’ve used them a little bit, but I’m generally impatient and don’t do as much research as I probably should online when making buying decisions. So I’ve always assumed that there are others who use these sites more than I do, but yet I’ve also thought they were far less popular than I expected.
For example, do you know anyone who really uses PriceGrabber, NexTag, Shopping.com, or Froogle a lot? I don’t.
That being said, I think these sites are very valuable for finding deals, so I’m glad to see they’re growing.
As an ecommerce retailer, I’ve worked with a few of them a little bit with product feeds, but I’ve always found it to be far more work than I got out of it. Usually it was hours of my time that ended up with little to nothing in the way of traffic and sales. If they can streamline their relationships with retailers and gain traffic growth, they could be EXTREMELY valuable.
I still don’t think ecommerce is where it can be yet. There is a lot that can be done with the web and new technologies to improve the process and gain greater efficiencies and pricing for consumers.
I sometimes do comparison shopping via bookmarklets, such as the Google Froogle Search or the AddAll bookmarklet. Bookmarklets can turn the multi-step process—navigating to a site and running a search—into a single step process. I realize they may not be intuitive for novice users, but I’m surprised that more sites don’t at least offer them as an option.