Over on the ChannelAdvisor blog, their CEO Scot Wingo, has just published Same Store Sales for the month of January. Same Store Sales compare how all of ChannelAdvisor’s customers are performing relative to the same period in the previous year.
Amazon leads the way up an amazing 84.5%, eBay growth was 5.8% with paid search turning in a healthy 22% growth. What is disappointing is the 1.9% growth rate for Comparison Shopping Channels. Whilst that’s still growth it does tend to suggest that comparison shopping may have run it’s course.
Scot doesn’t break out Comparison Shopping results by venue – it would be interesting to see the figures if the free channels such as Google Product Search were excluded. If you use Comparison Shopping to promote your products which ones are still performing for you?
The likes of Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, NextTag, and Kelkoo all used to feature heavily in Google search results, but that hasn’t been the case for a number of years. Is it simply the loss of high profile search positions that has caused the slowdown or is there another reason for customers abandoning these sites?
With ecommerce growing at (using Scot’s figures) 13.4% year on year there is no shortage of customers on the web, they’re just not increasing their use of comparison shopping. So are your buyers now using alternatives such as social media to research products? Are they going direct to retailer or manufacturer websites? Are they no longer performing product (or more often simply price) comparisons, or have they simply found new ways to do their research?
When you have a purchase to make which methods do you find to locate the ideal product at the best price with the service you want. Do you use Comparison Shopping sites or have you found more convenient ways to find what you’re looking to purchase?
16 Responses
Great questions Chris.
But someone needs to do a proper market research survey to find out the answer.
Ask 1,000 people in the street how they buy on the internet.
Its no use asking on here, as everyone will have different theories.
(my theory is that Social shopping and Facebook may be having an ifluence.)
Are people using google shopping more, eliminating the need for comparison websites? Perhaps people are not just buying on price but more interested in customer service elements of the package now.
I’ve never used comparison shopping sites, hate them, too many clicks.
There are many ways to add value, price is not the most important or effective one.
For books etc. Amazon is (to most customers, including myself) a price comparison site. The marketplace section offers me a choice of merchants, allowing me to choose between them.
The main difference is that Amazon offers the buyer more protection and is quicker (I like not having to input my credit card number every time), but charges the merchant much more.
eBay and Magento link up
Hope it leads to better integration, not good news for ChannelAdvisor. We already have our Magento website integrated with Amazon.
https://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/a-year-later-welcome-ebay-to-the-magento-family/
Our clients and business continues to grow because comparison shopping is not a dead industry. Check out this article about Shopzilla:
https://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20110210/its-back-scripps-shopzilla-nearly-left-for-dead-growing-again/?reflink=ATD_yahoo_ticker
“Revenue up 38%”
If you’re not listing your products on comparison shopping engines you’re missing out on 5-10% of your ecommerce store’s total potential revenue.
Something to note is that the CSE’s do a lot of their own paid search marketing. Many times consumers go through shopping engines without even knowing it. @Mathew Ogborne great point.
Our tracking for CSE shows them up YOY in same store sales for our large retailers apart from Google shopping results, although Google is the largest for most. The smaller ones are indeed hurting but the top 4 still do a very good job of agregating offers in a variety of ways a consumer finds interesting. Google actually pulls reviews from some of these sites and Amazon advertises on them.