Aggregators Gain Momentum in Online Shopping Industry; New Consumer Behavioral Shift Means Less Than Half of Online Shoppers Go Directly to Merchants.Business Editors LOS LOS Length of stay, see there ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 6, 2004 More than half of online buyers (54%) started their shopping at an aggregator site while just 46% started at a merchant site, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. a recent March 2004 study of over 3,800 online buyers by shopping search and comparison site BizRate.com. In just 15 months, online consumer behavior has shifted by 8 percentage points, tipping the balance in favor of upon the side of; favorable to; for the advantage of. See also: favor aggregators for shopping searches. By contrast, consumers typing in a merchant's URL URL in full Uniform Resource Locator Address of a resource on the Internet. The resource can be any type of file stored on a server, such as a Web page, a text file, a graphics file, or an application program. had accounted for 54% of sales leads A sales lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product or service, and represents the first stage of a sales process. The lead may have a corporation or business associated with the person(s). in a prior study of over 4,200 online buyers conducted in December, 2002. In that study, aggregators, which include comparison shopping sites, search engines, shopping portals and auction sites, had accounted for only 46% of sales leads. "This is a very large shift in consumer behavior within a very short time period," said Chuck Davis  This article or section contains information about one or more candidates in an upcoming or ongoing election.Content may change as the election approaches. Charles E. , President & CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of BizRate.com. "We've seen consumers shift their behavior in other industries in favor of aggregators also. For example, magazines are bought mostly through subscription agents, and roughly half of online travel bookings occur mostly through aggregator sites like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz. It was only a matter of time before online shopping followed the same trend. This trend will continue to accelerate in favor of shopping aggregators." The comparison shopping sites and shopping search engines provide product prices from many merchants. "The Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the created price competition which consumers love," Davis continued. "But merchants also love the role search engines and comparison sites have played in their businesses. The shopping search engines draw millions of customers to their sites. To get this same shopping traffic, individual retailers would have to spend millions. But instead they save marketing expense and get great volumes of leads from the aggregators." BizRate.com this week, as an example, has over 11,000 flower product offers to select for Mother's Day gifts. Any one flower site would struggle to have a number approaching that volume of products. In the last six months, BizRate.com has expanded the number of products found in its search engine from 7 million to 27 million. Moreover, the number of merchants featured at BizRate.com has grown from 4,000 to 43,000 over that same period. "We want consumers to have many choices of products, product prices, and merchants too," Davis concluded. About BizRate.com's Study Methodology The BizRate.com Online Research Value Panel study, conducted in March 2004, represents a sample base of 3,870 online buyer respondents In the context of marketing research, a representative sample drawn from a larger population of people from whom information is collected and used to develop or confirm marketing strategy. . The same study and questions were asked in the December 2002 Value Panel, which had a sample base of 4,213 online buyers. About BizRate.com BizRate.com is the largest, fastest and most accurate shopping search engine on the Web. With an index of over 30 million products from more than 40,000 stores, BizRate uses ShopRank(TM), a proprietary shopping search algorithm In computer science, a search algorithm, broadly speaking, is an algorithm that takes a problem as input and returns a solution to the problem, usually after evaluating a number of possible solutions. , to produce the industry's most relevant search results by weighing price, popularity and availability of products, against the reputations of merchants that sell them. At the heart of ShopRank(TM) are BizRate's signature merchant and product ratings, collected from more than one million online buyers each month making them the most statistically reliable ratings on the Web. Every week, the BizRate.com shopping search engine prepares millions of shoppers to make smarter, more confident purchases and sends them directly to the checkout page of thousands of online merchants. Founded in 1996, BizRate.com is a profitable company. |
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