How much wasted time does a good deal cost?

Guildford – 1 st May 2005 - ChoiceBiz launches choiceIT.com

When you last shopped on the internet, you probably saved money - but at what cost? How much time did you actually spend going from site to site checking out product details buried within the depths of retailer web pages, and how confident were you with your final choice - if based purely on price?

Comparison Shopper web-sites are now an essential part of shopping on the web – how else can you sensibly pick the right deal when there are literally hundreds of models to choose from? Shoppers now instinctively reach for the keyboard keys instead of the car keys because we know someone out there can provide it at a better price. It was only a question of time before the mushrooming retailers and their products overwhelmed the electronic shopper.

This brings us to the 1st generation Comparison Shopper sites. These have simple price comparisons usually over a limited number of product categories – but at least you didn’t have to trawl through a particular retailer site’s pages only to find that the price was too much. At the time these were quite an improvement, able to filter for example, from nearly a thousand Digital Cameras models to a handful (or a hundred!) within your price range. However they don’t take account of other features that might interest you – which would otherwise further reduce your shortlist to more manageable numbers. Specialist and consumer magazines go a long way to addressing this with “blobs” or “stars” identifying the best buy. But who actually decided that a particular feature was more important than another – you or the magazine?

This takes us nicely to 2nd generation Comparison Shopper sites. Here the idea is to recognize the needs of all parties – shoppers, manufacturers, retailers and marketing, and bring them together in an efficient and mutually supportive way. ChoiceBiz is a UK company that has spent the last five years developing a new site www.choiceit.com that addresses this inter-relationship so that:

SHOPPERS: now have a free, independent and unbiased guide where as they ‘point & click’ their preferences, thumbnail photos of any non-qualifying products simply fall away - revealing a personalised shortlist. A further click on a thumbnail photo reveals full product details plus links to relevant retailer web-pages from where they can buy directly or view further information. These preferences can be as simple (for example, just “pricing”) or comprehensive as your needs require, and are not shaped by the editorial leanings and rankings that often characterise consumer reports. The key here is to use the shopper’s own needs to get a ‘better fit’, while at the same time maximising use of graphics to make the experience easy. We also make a point of not using distracting pop-ups.

RETAILERS: benefit by receiving visits to their own site from highly focused prospects who have already shortlisted their product(s) additionally qualified by geographical location and awareness of the retailer’s promotional text.

MANUFACTURERS: can showcase their product ranges for comparison, optionally including their dealerships as retailers. Manufacturers are given control of their own data to conveniently enter and update products on-line into any of the growing number of product categories. This built-in Content Management facility which ChoiceBiz has developed using Macromedia’s Flash and ColdFusion, means that new ChoiceIT product categories can be created at the rate of one a day – well beyond the scope of most (if not all) existing Comparison Shopper web-sites.

MARKET RESEARCHERS: As shoppers use the site, their preferences are automatically captured and accumulated into a dynamically expanding database. Marketeers can set up consumer profiles against which to download or graphically view this data online, as a series of bar-charts. Without compromising shoppers’ privacy rights, the granularity of these statistics allows answers to such questions as:

“Over the last 3 months for men (aged 35-42) from the Guildford area:

• What pricing was acceptable?
• Which options were preferred?
• What features were important/irrelevant
• How they rated your product against the competition
• Compare all the above with the period before your last campaign.”

Other sites can offer feedback based on perceived retailer performances and user experiences, but these can be difficult to substantiate especially for malicious intent - which can lead to litigation. ChoiceIT avoids this trap, by remaining objective and returning statistics based upon how consumer preferences stack up against product specifications.

It’s not difficult to see therefore, how feedback like this from already targeted potential customers gives both researchers and manufacturers a much better idea of what we consumers really want in a product. This in turn should hopefully lead to the generation of better shaped products for us – and from 1 st May 2005 www.choiceit.com can offer a new and painless way from which to choose them.