If offline shopping can make customers spend a whole day going around, paying more for their movement, effort and time to examine the best quality product at the lowest possible price, then online shopping can be said to be in complete contrast to it. Electronic commerce can help customers easily find their favorite products at attractive prices with just a click.

Nowadays, online shopping has evolved to a higher level, more modern and functional due to the development of the internet and e-commerce in which a great number of websites referred to as “Comparison Sites” or “Shopbots” have been established. This has generated a new shopping trend named Comparison Shopping. The most important sense of Comparison Shopping is to save money. It is absolutely good to compare prices before deciding to buy any items. To execute a comparison shopping, all customers need to do is to start up their computers, open a new browser, enter a Comparison Site and type in the search box the item which they are looking for. A result page with a wide range of products from many different sources will be returned with full information and images.

In recent years, Comparison Shopping has become more common than ever. Its popularity has opened a new opportunity for online merchants to boost sales by collaborating with Comparison Sites which can increase their internet presence as well as improve potential customer accessibility to their online stores. In addition, click conversion rates from browsers into buyers in Comparison Sites is much higher than advertisement banners since most customers employing comparison shopping are considered as prospective ones. Once they search for an item, it means they are truly in “ready-to-buy” position, not just “window shoppers”. Therefore, getting access to these customers is very important and Comparison Sites are extremely effective within the e-commerce industry.

In terms of expenditure, we can divide Comparison Sites into three groups. The first one is Comparison Sites which are free to upload products on their sites such as Bing Shopping or TheFind. The second one is going to charge your a cost – per – click (CPC) fee like Google Shopping, Nextag, PriceGrapper, Amazon Product Ads, Become, Pronto, Shopping.com, ShopZilla etc. Meanwhile, some such as SortPrice or Oodle offer a free but limited service. It can means your listing will be limited in number and visibility, and have a poor technical support.

In case retailers or manufacturers want their goods to be displayed and offered on a few of CSEs (Customer search engines) at the same time at a reasonable price, they can use services from ChannelAdvisor for example, exhibit their products on several Comparison Shopping Websites like Google Shopping, Microsoft’s Bing, Nextag etc, and advertise them on the best marketplaces as eBay, Amazon, Newegg etc.

When utilizing an all-in-one service from a service like ChannelAdvisor, retailers can escape from a busy and complicated multifaceted retail experience. With an account on ChannelAdvisor and a connector module to their Magento store such as our ChannelAdvisor to Magento module, retailers are able to keep track all orders and information which then flow into the Magento platform website from ChannelAdvisor and vice versa enabling them to unify their data management flow to just one system.

In short, be wise to choose a good CSE which is appropriate for your business and your budget. CSEs cannot decide the success of any businesses, but it certainly has been and will be an invaluable assistant to your day to day business management.