Have you used Shopping.com?  It has a lot of good pricing information on a variety of products. And the reviews imported from ePinions can also be very helpful in making a purchase decision.  However, the biggest draw back is the lack of critical product information- specifically in Movies, Music and Books categories.

For example, lets look at Batman Begins. The very first offer description is “UPC: 01256959414″. Well lets be realistic, that UPC means nothing to me. In order to figure out what format, and edition it is I would normally go Google the UPC. The next offer description is “Format: DVD, UPC: 01256959414″. That’s the same UPC. So now I know that its a DVD. But thats as much information as I’ll get aside from Condition information. So I’m likely to just find the lowest price and click it… Not knowing what edition or version I am going to get.

What we did with SecretPrices.com to fix this is call upon Amazon Web Services to bring in that lacking information. As you can see the Batman Begins listing at SecretPrices.com shows Format, Edition and various format attribute information. And for collectors looking for that special Two-Disc Deluxe Edition with Comic Book, they can find it much easier than scanning UPC #s.

Why wouldn’t Shopping.com provide this information. Well, it is possible they don’t have the information… Or maybe they want you to click through and find the information yourself (they’ll make money). Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com states in this post “a lot of the engines have been set up to monetize the user as much as possible either through driving clicks to multiple merchants or through driving sponsored link (Adwords ads) clicks. Why educate the user if you can make money by getting rid of the user as quickly as possible?”

That may shed some light onto why there is so much information lacking from their pricing comparison site. But looking at the long-run its not a good business model. Providing less information to the end-user will ultimately end up in frustration and dissastifacation in the service as a whole.  Thats my stance…

Part II will discuss the implementation of eBay items (coming soon).

[tags]shopping comparison, shopping.com, amazon, ebay, web services, web2.0, batman begins[/tags]