Online buyers shift to aggregator sites, BizRate reports

The proportion of online buyers who start their shopping trips at aggregator sites-—search engines, comparison sites, e-shopping malls and auction sites-—has increased from 46% of shoppers to 54% in 15 months, according to a new survey from shopping comparison site BizRate.com Inc. BizRate this month released figures from a March survey of 3,800 online buyers that showed percentages had flipped from shoppers favoring direct navigation to a site by entering a URL to going to an aggregator site first.

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"This is a very large shift in consumer behavior within a very short time period," says Chuck Davis, president and CEO of BizRate.com. "We`ve seen consumers shift their behavior in other industries in favor of aggregators also. For example, magazines are bought mostly through subscription agents, and roughly half of online travel bookings occur through aggregator sites like Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz. It was only a matter of time before online shopping followed the same trend."

Davis argues that sites such as BizRate.com are good for merchants in that they expose the merchant’s brand to the millions of consumers who use such sites. "The shopping search engines draw millions of customers to their sites. To get this same shopping traffic, individual retailers would have to spend millions. But instead they save marketing expense and get great volumes of leads from the aggregators," Davis says.

BizRate.com reports that in the last six months, it has expanded the number of products found in its search engine from 7 million to 27 million. It says the number of merchants at BizRate.com has grown from 4,000 to 43,000.