Comparison Shopping Engines Get Busy

At last some good news for comparison shopping engines, as buyers flocked to their sites at  the last minute.

 Shopping.com gained 34% in market share  in the week ending Dec. 22, while Smarter.com gained 17%, Yahoo Shopping 4% and Shopzilla 3%. Best Buy, Dell and Macy’s also saw strong growth.

Overall traffic to the 100 e-commerce sites included in the Hitwise U.S. Retail 100 Index was up 16% from the comparable week a year ago, and down 10% from the week that ended Dec. 15, 2007.

Amazon led the Hitwise U.S. Retail Index list of top online shopping sites but it’s market share dropped 5% the week before Xmas.  Hitwise lists the top 20 sites with it’s share of trafic and share change: 

Amazon.com, 12.03%, -5%

• Wal-Mart, 7.94%, -2%
• Target, 5.06%, -6%
• Best Buy, 3.96%, 13%
• Half.com, 3.90%, -4%
• Yahoo Shopping, 3.21%, 4%
• Circuit City, 3.07%, 5%
• Sears.com, 2.38%, 0%
• BizRate.com, 2.37%, 1%
• JC Penney, 2.03%, -18%
• Overstock.com, 2.01%, -19%
• Dell USA, 2,01%, 18%
• Toys ‘R’ Us USA, 1.97%, -20%
• Smarter.com, 1.81.%, 17%
• Shopzilla, 1.69%, 3%
• QVC.com, 1.55%, -8%
• Macy’s, 1.43%, 18%
• Kmart.com, 1.34%, -3%
• Kohls.com, 1.30%, -5%
• Shopping.com, 1.21%, 34%

The Hitwise retail index does not include sites from such categories as auctions, home entertainment and music downloading. Hitwise collects data from 10 million U.S. Internet users.

Comparison Shopping Engine Traffic up 56%

Hitwise is reporting that comparison shopping engines saw an online market share increase last week compared to the same week in 2006. Traffic to the leading comparison shopping engine traffic increased 56 percent. Search engines were the main driver of traffic to the top comparison shopping websites with Google referring 20 percent of visits and Yahoo! Search referring 14 percent for the week ending Nov. 3, 2007Yahoo! Shopping had the largest market percentage with 20 percent and their market share increasing 44 percent from the same week last year. Smarter.com and Bizrate followed with 15 and 14 percent, respectively.

• Retailers benefiting the most from downstream traffic from the top comparison shopping websites were Amazon, eBay, Target, Overstock.com, Wal-Mart, and JCPenney
• The leading product search terms driving traffic to the comparison shopping websites were laptop computers, Nintendo Wii, LCD TV, digital cameras, iPods, and Xbox360 for the four weeks ending Nov. 3, 2007.

From Internet Retailer:

“More consumers are buying gift cards, mostly in stores but also online, and using them online and off. Two initiatives announced this week by Shopping.com and eBay illustrate the growth and multi-channel character of gift cards.

Comparison shopping site Shopping.com, which has sold gift cards in the past, has now created a section devoted just to gift cards that can be used at specific merchants. The landing page for the section, shopping.com/gift-cards, unveiled this week, highlights cards from 20 well-known merchants, and links to thousands of other gift card offers. Consumers can sort through those offers by price and retailer name. The gift cards typically can be used both in stores and online. “

Full Story: http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=24281