More and more shoppers are going online to find the best deals for the products they are planning to purchase, which has lead to an increase of traffic to price comparison sites by about 37% over the last year.
Microsoft also recently reported an increase of 15% in their searches in the month after they launched Live Cashback.
Historically, when it comes to saving money online, price comparison sites have been the most popular direction for users to go for. Over the last year however, voucher and cash-back sites have been increasing their market share too. To compare these, Hitwise put together information for the top 10 price comparison sites, voucher sites and cashback sites over the last few years:
Looking at the graph above we can see that although price comparison sites took a dip mid 2007, this has started to climb again for 2008. Looking at voucher and cashback sites however, we can see that they have gradually increased over the last 2 years. Vouchers sites have managed to double in size over the past year and receive twice as much traffic as cashback/reward sites, but still receive less than a third of the total that goes to the ever popular price comparison sites.
This of course leads to retailers and what they should be thinking about to maximise the potential of this current shopping trend: Which type of sites deliver the most traffic?
Looking at the above graph we can see that the upstream traffic trend that retailers receive is very similar to the three sub-categories market shares. If this is looked into even deeper though, it becomes clear that different money saving sites suit different types of retailers. Price comparison sites are more traditionally suited to gadgets and white goods retailers (ever gone looking for the cheapest mobile phone?) while voucher sites are better suited to fashion and entertainment areas.
It will be interesting to see how this online shopping trend progresses and also how retailers will harness the potential of these sites to their advantage - and to the advantage of the bargain-savvy consumer.
