Yellow pages losing ground to the Internet for local shopping

More consumers are going to Internet search engines for local shopping rather than using their phone books, according to a new study from Kelsey Group and Constat Inc. 70% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source while shopping locally for products and services, the study shows. That’s a 16.6% increase from 60% in October 2003.

This means the Internet is on par with newspapers as a resource for local shopping and will likely surpass the use of newspapers in the near future, the research report says. In 2005, 73% of consumers used newspapers to search for local merchants, up 4.3% from 70% in October 2003.

“Most of the Internet’s growth for shopping research can be attributed to large search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, the usage of which increased significantly, from 47% in 2003 to 55% in 2005,” says Tim Trickett, vice president of business development at Constat.

The research is based on a Kelsey Group/Constat phone survey of 500 people, 18 years and older, in February. The respondents were drawn equally from the Metropolitan Statistical Tier 1 and Tier 2 areas.