Definition of Shopping Search Engine

A shopping search engine can be defined as a search engine that allows similarity/comparison of features and prices for a wide variety of products and customer are flocking to them.

How shopping engines can work

One of the fastest growing areas of search marketing is shopping search. Shopping search engines enable us to compare similar products of different brands across many purchasing factors such as prices, reviews and availability. Usually you can find all these things on a same place. The facility we use to compare product prices is usually supplied by the shopping search engines. It is to observe that only 30 percent of all Internet users worldwide used a shopping search in 2006, but that grew to 35 percent in 2007 and continues to rise.

From Consumers Point of View

As far as consumers are concerned they like shopping search engines because shopping search engines allow concurrent comparison of similar products across many purchasing factors, such as price, reviews, and availability. People love shopping search engines because shopping search engines cover a huge range of consumer products, including electronics, office supplies, house ware, painting, DVDs, toys and many others. People who visit shopping search sites already have a good idea of what they are looking for, with price and accessibility often formative from who they buy.

Shopping Search Sites and Marketers

To take advantage of shopping search engines, search marketers should ensure that no data is missing for products. For example, make sure your provide availability data (in stock, ship with two weeks, and so on) for your products. If you do not, when shoppers sort the product line by availability, your products will go down to the bottom of the list.

List of Shopping Search Engines and Market Share

We have managed top shopping sites according to their market share. We have included Yahoo!, Price Grabber etc. for your consideration. Here we go.

• Yahoo! Shopping leads with 40% of total market share.
• Shopping.com is a second largest competitor of Yahoo! Shopping followed by 25% of total market share.
• MSN Shopping gets its 3rd place with 9% of total market share.
• Bizrate Shopping and Pricegrabber counterpart with the same percentage i.e. 8%