Sites Offer Web Browsers Some Help
By Teresa F. Lindeman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nov. 20–With Internet sales projected to increase as much as 20 percent this holiday season and consumers set to spend more than $20 billion online, companies from big dogs Yahoo! Shopping and Google’s Froogle to newcomers such as PriceRunner.com are angling to help.
Even consumers who don’t buy online but use the Web to research purchases have spurred the growth of such shopping comparison sites as ShopLocal.com and Cairo.com, which attempt to find deals at local bricks-and-mortar stores.
Nobody could use them all and some people never use any, preferring to go directly to their favorite online stores or just do a Google search. But more online shoppers are discovering the comparison sites, according to Forrester Research analyst Carrie A. Johnson. Nielsen/NetRatings found five sites hosted almost 57 million visitors in September alone.
To help those of you who are so inclined to give the sites a try, the PG sampled the five — Shopzilla.com, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag.com and Froogle.com — to offer a glance at what’s out there.
In the interest of full disclosure, we did not make actual purchases, so were unable to track shipping time and test return policies. Those are the responsibility of the actual online stores, though the merchant reviews offered by many comparison sites can offer insights into what to expect.
It quickly became clear that one area that most Web personal shopper sites need to improve is helping consumers determine the tax and shipping price.
Several tried to offer estimates, based on the shopper’s ZIP code, but there always seemed to be items where costs were not available until the purchase was in progress. In one case, the site’s projected shipping total did not mention a $5 surcharge for oversized items that the store later added.
It also became clear that, while such sites serve as a way to determine what’s considered a reasonable price or to get a fuller sense of the choices than may be found during a quick trip to South Hills Village , they can have the effect of offering too many choices.
Most have been adding new ways to fine-tune the search, but even when the choices have been narrowed, the consumer must still do plenty of pointing and clicking within each store’s individual site to determine exactly what is being offered. But then many, not including Froogle, make their money based on click-throughs to retailers.
Beyond those broad criticisms, here’s what we found:
–What we were looking for: Dora’s Talking Kitchen
First shot at the job: Shopzilla.com
Dora’s Talking Kitchen — a toy that connects technology, a TV show, an ethnically diverse heroine and food — made some of the hot 2005 toy lists. Sounded like a safe bet for a young girl.
The assignment was given first to Shopzilla.com, the Web site with the scary name that Nielsen/Net Ratings calculated had almost 15 million unique users in September.
Shopzilla.com found five places to buy the kitchen with prices ranging from $69.94 at Walmart.com to $106.58 at Avery Street Cards and Toys, a shop that didn’t have enough customer feedback from Shopzilla’s sister Web site BizRate.com to get either a green happy face rating or a red sad face. KBToys, eToys and department store Boscov’s rounded out the list.
It was helpful to know that while Wal-Mart may not make social activists smile a lot, it did get green happy faces for on-time delivery and customer support, based on ratings by 50,000 customers since 2000.
Typing Dora’s information into the other comparison sites turned up some of the same sources and prices, but there were a few different ones, bolstering the case for using a couple of sites. Shopping.com found four sources for the toy kitchen including Amazon.com and the Nickelodeon Store, or Nick.com.
Yahoo! Shopping offered almost a dozen suggestions but clicking on shops listed under names such as davidphan.com and Superficialgirl.com led back to Walmart.com.
Dora’s kitchen either comes in more than one version or the Web description writers approached their assignments differently. Some sites touted the toy’s five recipe adventures maps while others boasted seven. But seeing the same colorful picture again and again offered some assurance that the goods were basically the same.
–What we were looking for: Digital camera
First shot at the job: Shopping.com
Every holiday involves futile attempts to look cool in the eyes of someone below the age of 18 while also trying to do it on the cheap. This task was given to Shopping.com, which electronically rushed off to hunt for a digital camera.
Immediately, the difference between searching for a specific brand name item and doing a random hunt became apparent. “You found over 2,200 items in digital cameras,” the personal Web shopper reported back.
Shopping.com offered ways to close in on the right gift: price range, brand, resolution, image sensor type. The site even asked and answered important questions, such as, “What is resolution?” Basically, the more megapixels the sharper the picture. It advised that 3.1 megapixels or more should be fine for print photos.
Still fantasizing about cheap, we clicked on the below $100 price range, which promised 127 items. Going for at least 4.0 megapixels under the theory the recipient might want printable shots narrowed the choices dramatically. There were only four left.
From here, the comparison site walked the shopper through issues such as memory type, flash function and zoom capabilities. This particular set of clicks ended with a single choice: the Mach-Power DX450 Digital Camera.
Oddly enough, the total projected cost was listed between $100 and $150, which would be considered a failure on one of those shopping-on-a-budget TV shows. Turns out, the camera was available at Amazon.com for $99.99 but shipping costs bumped it up to $106.16. SmartBargains.com was offering free shipping but the base price was $149.99. Both were rated as “trusted stores,” based on hundreds of reviews.
That experience proved simpler than one at Yahoo! Shopping, which turned up more than 10 pages of items with the words “digital camera” in them. When sorted by price, the top selection was a camera posted at Yahoo! Auctions for a penny, though the seller was clearly expecting more.
Shopzilla.com had a pretty detailed buying guide, including recommendations for beginners, intermediate and advanced photographers. None were under $250. NexTag had a feature where the shopper could arranged to be alerted when the price on an item hit a required level.
–What we were looking for: Shoes — no, wait — a handbag
First shot at the job: Yahoo! Shopping
The folks at Yahoo! Shopping reported that shoes ranked sixth on its list o f top 10 product searches during the first week of November, so that sounded like a good task to try. But who wants to give shoes for Christmas? A purse sounded harder to mess up.
Given a price range between $25 and $75, Yahoo pulled together page after page of handbags. In the midst of the boring and the bland, there was a pink-and-gold silk one made in Vietnam and carried by Overstock.com. If you believe the store, the purse was originally $75 but could be had for $30.99, plus shipping of $2.95.
But, hey, that conservative Louis Vuitton monogram canvas mini speedy bag from shoponusa.com might be a safer bet. And such a deal. Regularly $299.99, this one could be had for $39.99.
Clicking on the store’s site, a disclaimer noted this retailer is devoted to “quality replica products and customer satisfaction.” As long as the recipient is satisfied with a knockoff, everything should be fine.
Taking the handbag search to other comparison sites proved a bit like shopping for purses at the mall. There seemed to be no easy way to find all the pink clutches or all the brown leather satchels. All the sites were helpful in searching by price and brand (lots of Louis Vuitton and Gucci).
–What we were looking for: Xbox 360
First shot at the job: NexTag.com
Driving all over town and fighting off other people for a Tickle Me Elmo or Cabbage Patch Doll is so 20th century. So NexTag.com went on the hunt for Microsoft’s new Xbox 360 system, a game system and more if the hype is accurate. Officially, it doesn’t hit the stores until Tuesday.
The comparison site took some time looking around but in the end just couldn’t find it. Like a baffled storekeeper, it managed a list of nine other Xbox items — cables, battery chargers, games — but not the system itself.
Inside a box labeled “additional resources” that looked suspiciously like paid advertisers, ShopLocal.com offered help but could only suggest shoppers try Best Buy, which, in turn, suggested going the old-fashioned route and checking the McKnight Road store for availability. The box also included a link to Web sites promising a Free! Xbox 360 in return for trying advertisers’ offers, which sounded a little dicey.
Shopping.com agreed with NexTag that the system was unavailable but Froogle pulled up more than a dozen online stores selling the coveted item. Comparing prices didn’t really matter since store after store listed it as on back-order, out-of-stock or just unavailable. One bluntly stated there was no guarantee of any delivery before Jan. 1.
On the other hand, a site called GameAsylum.com that turned up on Yahoo! Shopping with a merchant rating of “very good” never seemed to mention there might be a delay in receiving $499 system, plus $8.62 shipping. Shopzilla had an Xbox 360 listing for another store that was being “re-rated” for some reason.
Caveat emptor, or buyer beware, is just as relevant online.
–What we were looking for: Fruitcake
First shot at the job: Froogle.com
Froogle, No. 5 in the Nielsen/Net Ratings rankings, got stuck with the fruitcake. It was a case of online shopping meets longtime holiday tradition.
The shopping comparison site turned up 838 results in .21 seconds. The first listing was for “fruitcake,” which pulled up seven choices including one for $27.50 from chic Neiman Marcus.
Since the most important thing about fruitcake is how good it is, we reorganized the main list by product ranking. Apparently people rate things that mention fruitcake higher than real fruitcakes. The top ranked item was a book, “A Christmas Memory,” by Truman Capote and Beth Peck.
It took three pages of clicking to find a $79.95 Harry and David’s “Tower of Tantalizing Delights,” which included a traditional fruitcake plus other munchies. Providing proof of the Internet’s linkability, most of the Harry and David merchant reviews on Froogle came from Shopzilla.com.
A little poking around showed the search might have been more targeted had we noted the category suggestions offered along the side. Choosing a “dessert” heading quickly pulled up three pages of the real thing.
Few of those had much in the way of product reviews by consumers. According to the Froogle help section, the shopping site run by Google scours the Web for information about merchants and products, using “computer algorithms” to calculate a rating for a store or product by combining data from multiple sites.
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