Shopping Comparison Toolbars and Sidebars
I haven’t seen too much coverage on shopping comparison toolbars from other shopping-related blogs for sometime now. It appears they haven’t caught on for the masses and perhaps they won’t… For me the toolbars seem a little too instrusive, and many people seem to agree. Brian at ComparisonEngines.com compares them to Clippy the Paper Clip (from Microsoft office products).
Still the ones listed below have caught my attention for continued growth and progress for 2006:
ActiveShopper
I have been following this one for a long time. It looks like it has some real promise in the future. It is a Shelron Group (SHRN) creation. Today they have announced that they will be integrating coupons, which I will be interested to see how they go about this.
Dealio
This is a newer toolbar that was launched just this year in August 3, 2005. It was released by Vendio, which does a lot of work with eBay. I haven’t had much time to look into this, but I plan on trying it out next month.
I tried ActiveShopper a while back… The real power of these lies within identify the product correctly right when the shopper is ready to purchase. Its like having a personal salesman from each store saying what they’ll sell it to you for… “hey buddy get it from our store for $xxx less”. Taking you away from the current merchant you are at. So the consumer is happy, in a perfect world scenario…
But lets be realistic now. As I stated earlier, the toolbars were too instrusive. Just like Clippy from Microsoft Office, the shopping toolbars I tried pops up even when I don’t want it to! For example, when I would just be browsing around it would popup… Even when I’m not shopping. This was, to me, irritating and distracting.
Related Entries:
If you are using Firefox, you should try out the Price Follower toolbar. As the name implies, this is a toolbar that lets you “tag” certain products as those you’re interested in “following” and alerts you when the price changes. The two big sites that the current version works with now are Amazon.com and PriceGrabber. It’s pretty cool, give it a try at http://www.pricefollower.com/