

Home Articles Ways to Shop the Web	Articles About KB

Ways to Shop the Web

by Kristoffer Bohmann, June 11, 2000

Described list of ways Web users can shop the Web today.

Product review sites

Product review sites enable users to share opinions about products and services. Such services provide a brilliant way for users to create an opinion about products before buying. The value of opinions seems to be biggest for tangible products (e.g., computers and cars), where fewer trial versions are available compared to intangible products such as news, book excerpts, and software 30-day trials. Some of the critical success factors these services face are:

Number of products reviewed (both new products and accumulated).
Information structure that is easy for users to comprehend.
Effective ways to communicate reviewer trustworthiness such as reviewer ratings and links to other reviews by the reviewer.
Making different products comparable. One example is car comparison tools from which users can compare car prices and features. Most comparison tools are have serious usability problems as users are required to invest substantial amounths of time to learn how to use them.

Other examples: Epinions, About.com.

Group Purchasing

Group purchasing sites improve customer buying power by increasing the quantity ordered per transaction. Users are expected to get lower prices and/or higher quality when buying as a group.

The technique has been used in the corporate world for generations, where suppliers have been put under pressure from their customers. The same is now being possible in consumer markets thanks to improved market communication tools such as LetsBuyIt.com

Multi-vendor catalogs

Multi-vendor catalogs typically compares prices from multiple vendors for defined products. More advanced services have more product attributes (e.g., availability, delivery time, and quality). This allows users to comparison shop to make a better deal (e.g., cheaper price or faster delivery).

Examples: International examples: Yahoo Shopping, AltaVista Shopping including reviews and attribute comparison, Buyer's Index promoting 12000 shopping sites. Some Danish examples: Scandinavia Online Books, Computer hardware prices at EDBpriser.dk, PDAs from Egmont computer prices, and Danish Price Index.

Reverse Auctions

Reverse-auction marketplaces, sometimes called pricebots or shopbots, allow users to set a price or send a specific purchase request to several vendors in one request.

For instance, a reverse-auction marketplace is enabling IT buyers (in the US) to state their maximum buy price for defined products and receive bids on orders from vendors. This lowers the costs of searching for business partners and is in turn likely to lower prices. These services are still time-consuming for users as vendors need to type in their quotes manually.

Examples: Request4Bid, MyGeek.

Auctions

Auction marketplaces allow users to sell new or used products to the highest bidder -- or buy. Some of the generic user tasks on auction sites are: User monitoring of ongoing auctions, sending bids, communicating seller trustworthiness to buyers, allowing actual buyers to evaluate each deal and seller, and avoiding too much security stuff creating usability nightmares.

eBay is the mother of online auctions. But they face competitions from other players like Amazon.com Auctions and Yahoo! Auctions. Further, several specialized auctions exist including sports and computers.

Product Configurators

Product configuration tools enable users to customize products such as computers and travels. In a near-future I predict that these services also make possible configuration of highly complex products such as cars. A test site gives an idea of how configurations work. Other examples are: Cisco's product configurator handling more than 100,000 configurations monthly. Dell who pioneered online product configuration in the computer industry and a Danish computer and flat screen manufacturer. Note that the page cannot be shown correctly as frames are used. :-(

Configurators should be used with caution. Only truly complex products should be configurable. Kellogg's Corn-Flakes could probably be configured in terms of taste, size, etc. but this would only make users' life more difficult.

Traditional Ecommerce Sites

Traditional ecommerce sites providing the opportunity to buy directly from online retailers, merchants, and manufacturers. Some of the largest sites use several of the techniques discussed above. Amazon.com is an example within consumer products, while Chemdex sell industrial components.

Epinions.com: Where to Buy

About the Author
Kristoffer Bohmann (biography) M.Sc. thinks and writes about high-quality user experiences. His philosophy: Users first. You can contact him at kristoffer@bohmann.dk.