There are a number of price comparison websites which allow you to see lists of costs for products like metal shelving and associated items like racking, lockers and storage boxes. The development of the internet in general and online shopping in particular has made price comparison sites profitable. In the UK, for instance, these services are making around 150m in revenue each year, and this is growing at an annual rate of approximately 40 percent. So if you're looking for metal shelving, you can go to sites such as BizRate, Kelkoo, Shopzilla and PriceRunner to name just a few. These price comparison services don't actually sell any metal shelving themselves, but they display the different costs of shelving from a range of retailers. So these sites give you a convenient, trusted venue to go to where you can see the range of prices for metal shelving and then go to the suppliers' websites before making your final choice. In addition to the websites already mentioned, people searching for metal shelving can go to the major web portals like Yahoo! and MSN which also offer comparison shopping services. In the UK some of the major comparison shopping services are DealClick and CompareStorePrices as well as Yahoo! and MSN which also provide UK services. Some comparison sites ask metal shelving retailers to pay the website a fixed fee for appearing. These were little more than an online version of the Yellow Pages. More sophisticated online shopping portals do not aggregate data-feeds from the shelving suppliers, they search and retrieve the data directly from each retailer site. This allows for a much more comprehensive list of retailers and the ability to update the data in real-time.
As well as price comparison sites which offer a very broad range of products for price comparison there are some that compare individual products. The providers of these services often claim to produce better results than the major comparison engines as they are concentrating on individual marketplaces such as metal shelving. A number of price comparison firms have developed online technology that searches retailers' websites for prices and stores them in a central database. Users can search for a product such as metal shelving, and see a list of retailers and prices for that product. The shelving firms on the site do not pay to be listed, but paid for every click on their metal shelving products. Another technology enables metal shelving firms to be more involved in the process. Here, retailers who want to list their metal shelving on the price comparison website will supply their own lists of products and prices, and these are compared with the original database. Price comparison sites can also collect data about products like metal shelving through a data feed file. The shelving firms provide information electronically in a particular format. This information is then imported by the comparison website. There are now a number of third-party suppliers which consolidate data feeds so that comparison sites do not have to import from many different metal shelving merchants.
Price Comparison Web Sites
People who are on the wrong side of this digital divide are the ones who are loosing the benefits this wonderful medium offers.
As people become more and more sophisticated online consumers, the general-purpose search engines fall short to cater to the kind of search requirements consumers have. It is not possible to get the quotes, for example, from all the vendors for a particular model of digital camera using a regular search engine. This is the void filled by the dedicated Product Comparison Websites.
There was a time when the Product Comparison Sites offered gadgets that only techies would be interested in, such as, cameras and computers. With the increased access to Internet to general population, and the awareness of the advantages of using product comparison sites, the situation has changed now. Product Comparison Sites are getting popular because of the wide variety of the products they cover, be it art or flowers or even the travel and camping related equipment.
Like the regular search engines, product search engines these days do crawl the retailer's websites to gather up-to-date data on products. This automation has contributed to the growth of the number of products these sites can offer comparison services to.
In an interesting paper titled "The Value of Information in an Online Consumer Electronics Market" three professors Michael Baye, a University of Indiana professor; John Morgan, a University of California at Berkeley professor; and Patrick Scholten, a Bentley College professor attempt to quantify the benefits this information revolution has brought to the consumers. They chose to quantify "the value of information provided by the Internet Price Comparison Sites". Price Comparison Services, according to these researchers "provide substantial value to consumers, and that this value will be enhanced over time as additional firms use e-tail distribution channels". This paper studied the prices compiled from various Product comparison sites for duration of eight months and the professors conclude that there is an average saving of upto 16% with the use of Product Comparison Sites.
One area that consumers have been vary of, is fraudulent vendors. Product Comparison sites have started taking steps to guard their users against fraudulent vendors, such as vendor ratings. Genuine retailers have been taking steps increase the level of trust consumers can keep in their products or services. With increased level of trust comes the explosion of usage.
In summary, Product Comparison Sites are becoming popular, a.Because of the void that normal search engines cannot fill, b.Automation has caused the explosion of products and services these sites can compare, c.Consumers can get an average 6% price benefit (and more if coupled with Coupons) which is huge and d.Steps being taken by these sites fraudulent vendors has increased consumer confidence in the listings.
If you are a retailer who is yet to list your product with the Product Comparison Sites, I would say, Wake Up!. Register your feed today. Consumers are searching for you.
Both Big Dug & Jonathan White are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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