Comparison Shopping Goes Hi-Tech

Online Shopping Comparison Sites Sharpen Up For Holidays

(AP)  Other new-wave comparison sites include:

FatLens.com, which has raised $8 million in venture capital and believes it has come up with a more effective way of finding the best deals for consumers;

Dulance, which enables users to create wish lists and receive electronic notices of hot deals through RSS Web feeds;

ConsumerClub, eDeals and CouponCabin, which all serve up rebates and coupons from a wide assortment of retailers;

Dealio, which offers a shopping toolbar that alerts shoppers when they are about to buy something available at a lower price elsewhere on the Web;

SquareTrade, which offers a shopping sidebar that patrols the prices of online auctions and provides fraud protection.

"We haven't seen a terrible amount of innovation in comparison shopping during the past four or five years," said Talmadge O'Neill, co-founder of Smarter.com, another newcomer to the field. "We are still in the early days. There is a huge pie out there yet to be had."

As they angle for a bigger piece of the action, even long-established comparison sites are rolling out improvements designed to make themselves even more appealing.

Yahoo's shopping channel, shopping.yahoo.com, for instance, is now offering prices and information for about 90 million products, up from 60 million a year ago.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company also is encouraging more social interaction on its shopping site by asking consumers to post lists of their personal recommendations. Yahoo plans to set up a system in which a consumer will receive a slice of Yahoo's commission if those recommendations send visitors to a merchant.

Besides Yahoo's shopping channel, Shopzilla and Shopping.com, other top shopping comparison sites include Google Inc.'s Froogle.com, PriceGrabber, NexTag and ShopLocal.

This group accounted for the bulk of the 49.3 million people who visited comparison sites during September, an 8 percent increase from 45.8 million at the same time last year, according to the most recent data from Nielsen/NetRatings.

At the top of the shopping cart, Shopzilla and Shopping.com each lured nearly 15 million U.S. visitors in September, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

In deals completed during the summer, Cincinnati-based newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps Co. bought Shopzilla for $570 million and online auctioneer eBay Inc. paid $685 million for Shopping.com.

Though they are attracting more traffic, none of the comparison sites so far have been able to establish themselves as indispensable e-commerce hubs. Most online shoppers still begin their research on the home page of a major Internet search engine, such as Google Inc. or Yahoo, forcing the comparison sites to advertise heavily to attract traffic.

"It's been a challenge for any of these sites to engender any kind of consistent loyalty so far," Dougherty said.

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By Michael Liedtke
©MMV The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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