subject: Shopping Sites [print this page] Shopping Sites Shopping Sites
When online shopping was just getting started, many people, including experts, were highly skeptical about it. How people are going to buy something that they have not even seen? How people are going to trust all these new sellers and re-sellers? Why would people pay shipping on an item that they can buy at a local mall or store? Who is going to guarantee the quality and delivery of the item that is ordered? Why would people put their credit card numbers on World Wide Web? In short, there were tons and tons of doubts and questions about online shopping. They thought that the big retailers and distributors will kill the small Internet start-ups in no time!
But, the convenience, and unprecedented variety and options offered by Internet shopping sites, have denied all these fears and doubts. Online shopping just keeps growing and growingwith a very rapid pace. Now, even the big retailers and disributors, who were supposed to kill the online shopping sites, cannot even imagine of doing business without an online shopping site of their own. Even the services businesses which never sold products before like, media companies for example, now have online shopping sites.
Out of rapidly growing competition, ever improving prospects and newly evolving technologies, there have grown so many types of shopping sites. Each of these types has it's own pros and cons and serves it's unique puepose / purposes. First and foremost of them are the shopping search sites. These sites provide the facility of performimg shoppin related searches, across the board, over the Internet. These sites are theprimary reason, due to which online shopping sites are increasing their share in retail, consumer and business,sales every day. These sites have made the shopping as easy as few clicks. Instead of going from one mall to the other and one store to the other, shoppers just go to these sites, perform a few searches, and boom. There they have the needed or wanted products or service withall availableglobal, nationaland local options, with just few clicks. No traffic jams, no long lines, no running and walking in malls and stores. This is an incredible progress and achievement, which was not even imaginable, just about twenty years ago. It has made shopping extremely convenient and headache free. ExcitingAds provides shopping search service that covers 60 million products world wide. People are now gradually realizing that no seller pays shipping from his own pocket. In regular brick amd mortar stores, it is already included in prices, while most online shopping sites, charge it separately.
Next are the shopping comparison sites. These sitescompare the prices of a certain product or service at major onlineshopping sites or service providers. There design has an advantage of instant price comparison, but,it does have it's limitations, though. This model can provide the comparison between only upto a certain number of stores. That is why these sites cannot provide unlimited reach to all the available options at any level, global, national, regional or local, like a shopping search site does.
Other shopping sites are shopping directories, also known as online shopping malls or catalogs.Most online shopping directories exist as a hybrid of online shopping search and directory, like ExcitingAds has. Online directories may be organized alphabetically orstorewise like an online version of malls or like an online version of paper catalog or into hybrids of two or more of these. Shoppers can browse through these directories, click, click, click, just like they go from store to store to store in a mall. Different people prefer different types of shopping sites. Some are good searchers and some are good browser and some like both of these. ExcititngAds provides a dirctory that is a unique hybrid of all these three types, alongwith a web search engine and a separate shopping search engine.
Then are the site that are direct retailers of products and services like Amazon.com and PeopleFinders.com. These sites are online versions of brick and mortar retailers and service providers. Like any other store or service provider, you just go to these site find what you are looking for and buy it right then and there. Like a regular store, these sites have therir limitations. On these sites you are like in an store or service provider's office.You have what they have, at theri prices and terms. You cannot search or browse across the board or look at all the available options.For that you have to go to a shopping search engine or directory site. Sites like Amazon.com have realized this limitation and they are now providing online marketplaces, where anyone can sell, but, due to the the linitations like fees, commissions, technical know-how, these marketplaces still have a scope that is far smaller and narrower then online shopping search engines and directories. At this point, I would like to mention that any directory, doesn't matter how big and comprehensive it is, cannot be as big and comprehensive as a shopping search engines database. So, if you want to keep your scope wide and want to find all the available options, you still have to use a shopping search engine, regardless of anything. Plus, when options are too many, browsing a directory becomes cumbersome, while search engine can find, summarize and present all the related results in a second.
Another option available to you in online shopping sites is auctions sites like Ebay. Online auction sites like Ebay have become wildly popular because of a general perception that you can buy things cheaper then other sites and selling places, because of auctions and ability to offer your own price or bid. Sellers are wildly inetrested in selling on these sites because contrary to common belief, out of buyer competition, they can usaully sell at a price that is higher then usual market value. Another advantage that these auction sites have is that you may be able to sell or buy the things that cannot be sold or bought anywhere else.
In short, whatever is your need or requirement is, online shopping sites have something cutting edge to offer you.These areconvenient, getting more and more safe, specially after zero liabilities offered to shoppers by most credit card companies and banks.
