Electronic Commerce Mediums - Search Engines, Shopping Comparison Sites
Wall street analyst calls search engines like Google the new trusted electronic commerce medium. As ecommerce grows search engine are a key link between consumers and approximately 500,000 online merchants. I would say that search engines also have competition with shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com and eventually social networks. Search engines may have been around longer than shopping comparison sites, but shopping comparison sites may be a better ecommerce medium for consumers.
Shopping comparison sites are more focused on consumers and they only act as an ecommerce medium for shoppers to link up with a merchant. The weakness of a shopping comparison site is that they are only offering to consumers the merchants that they have partnerships with. I think some shopping comparison sites are improving their sites by offering non-affiliate merchants in their comparison results.
Search engines do have the potential to offer consumers more opportunities to find more stores that carry a given product. My experience is that search engines do not locate more merchants that have a given product. Even when they do it is not easy to identify which site in the search results has the product and it is not easy to compare product offerings between merchants. A plus for search engines and internet portals such as Yahoo! is that they offer a “one stop shop” where consumers can conveniently shop, do research, sent e-mail, play games, etc. I would think casual, online shoppers would prefer just using their favorite search portal versus going to a shopping comparison site to shop.
Social networks at some point may become a good ecommerce medium to link consumers with merchants. There are opportunities for merchants to receive endorsements from influencers and for consumers to read reviews about merchants and products. To date there are a lot of startups focused on social shopping, but none of them are there yet.