2014 Electricity Business Four things you know?

Compared with the previous year, the value of the US electric quotient industry in 2013 has increased to $230 billion trillion, up 13%, according to Forester Research, an independent technology marketing firm. According to Internet retailer analysis, search drive more than 30% of E-commerce traffic, but also the main part of E-commerce.

However, in the past year, the shopping search field has changed enormously. The mainstream search engine has turned its shopping search results into a full pay model, driven entirely by Product list ads (Plas). There are also some comparison shopping engines that have been driven by commercial interests. As retailers throw less money into advertising businesses, it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to find some of the shopping results they need.

What will be the impact of these changes on the consumer's shopping experience?

ComScore, the global Internet Information service provider, says the flow of traffic to retail sites through mobile channels accounts for more than 45%. So how does this change affect the mobile-phone and user experience for users who use smartphones and tablet computers?

1, consumers spend more money, things but see less

Online business model Drive system, the consumer's shopping experience is obviously unsatisfactory. What consumers see is those search engines choose the products you see, these products are in fact a subset of the electrical products, and the result is that consumers have less choice, and in many cases, consumers will spend more money. For retailers, they have to spend more money on advertisers to get traffic. Many retailers have to cut back on their advertising costs, and then put money on some core products, because the higher returns from a core product tend to offset the growing advertising costs of businesses.

TheFind, a shopping search engine, recently conducted a study comparing major search engines and shopping searches, and comparing shopping sites, in the hope of quantifying the impact of search on consumers. The study compared more than 50 search engines and six shopping categories, and finally found that the price of Google's search for goods is 12% higher than the average price, in comparison with the lowest price on the line, Bing's search results a premium of 25%, while Yahoo's premium of 31%.

2, the lowest price is not the only thing consumers pay attention to, localization, coupons, commodity evaluation and so on, these are consumer shopping attention factor

The current shopping comparison engine focuses on comparing commodity prices, but as retailers cut back on advertising, many search engines fail to give the most accurate results. However, consumers actually want more things. Because in addition to the price, consumer purchase decisions are often driven by other factors, such as local merchants, sellers rankings, product reviews, visual search, coupons, return policy, freight, payment methods and so on. The vast majority of shopping search engines do not provide these elements to consumers, leading to these search engines and consumers are very disjointed, and finally not only waste the consumer time, the whole shopping experience is frustrating.

3, find the sale of a product of all the merchants, become more and more difficult

Some online retail giants, they only show the merchant on their own platform. As shopping searches change, consumers will find it hard to find all the sellers who sell a single item. In a comparative study of the thefind mentioned above, they found that some sites offering shopping comparison services have been finding fewer businesses by search and, to some extent, the scope of the search merchant has become more and more preferred.

4. The impact of the mobile electricity business is even greater.

The reversal of the industry, which has been brought about by search engines, is only now showing an impact in the advertising arena, but the impact is now in the consumer's shopping experience, especially for users who use mobile devices for shopping. Once shoppers find differences in different search engines, they go to new search engines, assuming that the new search engine must be able to provide the best results and shopping experience and save time and money for consumers. Today, changing a search engine is too easy, and users don't even need to change the default search engine on their browsers. All they have to do is simply download a shopping search app on a smartphone or tablet, and then make a shopping search anytime, anywhere.

Impact and opportunities

Shopping search is a technical challenge that spans all categories of goods and provides high-quality commodity information with cutting-edge computer science and state-of-the-art large data technologies. For example, the shopping search engine TheFind has 500 million independent product quotes, covers 500,000 online merchants, and updates more than 160 million product quotes per day. Can compete with it, that is, Google and Amazon.

In the near future, with the overall consumer experience of mobile devices, making shopping search more challenging, they need to solve online and offline shopping problems, provide consumers with "What to buy" search services, and provide a better transaction after the service experience.

For retailers, they need to make more accurate decisions about advertising revenue. Provide consumers with integrated vertical shopping search experience across mobile and Web platforms------This opportunity has been opened to the door.