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By: John Delon on Mon Feb 9, 2009

The first question you may have when reading the title of this article is 'What is a Comparison Shopping Engine?'. This is a valid question since the usage rates of price comparison websites and shopping engines in Canada is extremely low. However in the US online price comparison shopping engines are very popular and provide a valuable service to consumers. There are at least 10 major US based comparison shopping engines with large user bases and they're slowly starting to become more popular here in Canada as well.

What are Comparison Shopping engines?

A Comparison Shopping Engine is an Internet search engine that displays detailed information about consumer products along with the online stores where the products are sold at in their search results. It is not a 'general' web search engine like 'Google' but rather a search engine where you can find out where to buy products and who has the best price.

When the user wants to see more information about the product they are interested in they can click on a search result and are usually then taken to the reatilers' website where they can then purchase the product if they wish.

Benefits of Comparison Shopping Engines

The key benefit of a price comparison search engine is that it allows consumers to see the prices at each retailer for the products they wish to purchase side by side and thereby make better buying decisions.

It is common for some electronics products such as digital cameras to be sold by 20 or more online stores and the consumer can quickly and easily see how much each one is charging for the product. Yes, there is more to purchasing a product than price but the service does give you some idea of the range of prices charged by the various online stores. It is also surprising to see the huge variance that can exist on the exact same product at 10 or more retailers. It is not uncommon to see a variance of many hundreds of dollars on products that only sell for $300 or $400 dollars. The savings obtained through these services can be significant.

General Canadian Price Comparison Search Engines

Up and coming Canadian Price Comparison search engines include AllShopping.ca, which launched recently and still has a large proportion of their product listings from the US but is quikcly adapting to the Canadian market and displaying more product listings from Canadian online retailers.

Other major Canadian Comparison Shopping Engines include ShopRover.ca and ShoppingSearch.ca. Again, both of these services have advanced interfaces with millions of product listings and thousands of merchants displaying their products but there still seems to be a large portion of American stores listed in the search engine and not enough Canadian retailers. We believe this is more a reflection of the marketplace rather than an expression of a weak product offering. It is clear that over time the proportion of Canadian online retailers listed will only increase.

Vertical Comparison Shopping Engines

It is important to mention that there are some existing Canadian comparison shopping engines with many Canadian stores listed but they tend to focus on only one shopping category. Amongst the better of these Canadian Price Comparison Shopping engines in the Electronics category is PriceCanada.ca.

In conclusion we believe that Comparison Shopping engines provide a useful and valuable service to Canadian consumers and because of this they will most likely significantly increase in popularity and usage here in Canada.