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Research Products on the Internet Before Buying
There are many sources that cite statistics that show how many people research products online before buying. The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently published the results of a study on American’s e-commerce habits. Among the findings: 58% of Americans say they perform online research on the products and services they’re considering buying. That’s up from 49% who performed online research in 2004.
Some of the surveys have even garnered information on how many hours of research is done for particular items. The majority of electronic consumers research online for an average of 12 hours before making a purchase, according to a Consumer Electronics Association and Yahoo! Study.
Consider the following while conducting your product search;
- Before you start researching an item online, write down the most important qualities you want. It may be that price is your first priority. Decide on a price range. Special features may be your concern. Decide what features are must-haves and which ones are not.
- Check several sources. Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, prices vary online. There are so many businesses on the Internet that prices can fluctuate from site to site. Most reputable sites will have the item at similar prices. Be wary if a site has the same item for a much higher or lower price.
- Bookmark your sites. This will make it much easier for you to return to sites that seem to give you the most valuable information.
- Quality varies, too. Check that the item you are researching has a detailed description. The best comparison is one that compares the item accurately.
- Another way to decide about an item is to look at reader comments. More and more, consumers are leaving comments and reviews on sites they visit. Reviewers leave comments about everything, from items they have purchased, how easy or hard it was to contact customer service, to the site layout.
- Look to see if other visitors have bought the same item you are researching. Check to see what they liked about the item, or did not like, once they received it. Read between the lines to see if a particular item is getting recommended or is getting negative feedback.
There are product comparison engines like Yahoo Shopping that find like items, compare them, and show reviews. Become is a fully integrated Web-wide product search and comparison shopping site. They claim to crawl over 3.2 billion web pages to bring current buying guides, expert reviews, consumer reviews, articles, specifications, forums, merchants, and a variety of other useful information to help consumers make better buying decisions.
PriceGrabber is another integrated comparison shopping site. Some of their special features include: BottomLinePrice calculations (tax and shipping included in price), Storefronts marketplace (individuals without a website can sell their own products), merchant ratings and reviews, detailed product information and reviews, side-by-side product comparisons and email notification of the best prices and availability on the Internet.
You want your resources to be reliable. One of the most reputable consumer reporting organizations is Consumer Reports. Long before they were online, Consumer Reports was, and still is, a magazine. They state their mission as “an expert, independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to work for a fair, just, and safe marketplace.”
Consumer Reports maintains that state-of-the-art testing equipment is always used and is sometimes complemented by equipment designed by their engineers. The actual tests are based not only on government and industry standards but also on standards their specialists think should apply.
Another consumer reporting organization is ConsumerSearch. Their objective is “to strive to make their content objective and precise; that their editors are not influenced by advertising or other commercial considerations.”
For each product category, ConsumerSearch provides the following information: Best Reviewed: their selection of the top-rated products, based on expert and user reviews; Full Report: their complete analysis of who the experts are and what they say, as well as our review of important product trends and developments; and, Sources: their ranking and description of the top reviews, complete with links.
Just because you research it online does not mean you have to buy it online. Consumers still like to look at products, try them out, take them for a “test drive.” Online research of products drives off line sales, too. According to eMarketer, for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales . In the CEA/Yahoo! Study mentioned earlier, with the average of 12 hours of research that consumers spent online before buying, nearly half of those who spent the time on the web still purchased offline.
Armed with research tools and reputable search engines, finding reliable product information will not be difficult.
