A Calgary company unveiled a new shopping website today that allows consumers to comparison shop for everything from air conditioners to designer jeans. In limiting itself to Canadian merchants, shoptoit.ca cancels out duty fees, paperwork and high shipping costs common to U.S. Internet retailers. “Canadians visit an American shopping search engine millions of times a month. That’s a lot of people looking for products, and money that could be kept within our border,” said co-founder Clark Johannson. Some popular search engines, such as U.S.-based Shopping.com or Froogle, list retailers who may not ship to Canada or add expensive freight charges, tariffs and other hidden fees.
Eighty-five retailers, including Indigo, Future Shop and Sears, are part of shoptoit.ca The revenue model is similar to Google, with merchants paying a referral fee only if a consumer “clicks through” to their site. “Retailers are happy to spend advertising dollars on search engines because it’s such a good investment,” said Johannson. “It’s a very easy thing for them to track — you’re either making a profit or you’re not.”
Online price comparison sites — designed to guide consumers to cheap deals — list the prices of commercial goods sold across the Web. EBay jumped into search-engine marketing last month, announcing it would buy the top comparison-shopping service, Shopping.com, for $620 million US. And Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine, has a comparison site of its own, dubbed Froogle, which analysts think could one day become the heart of a fullfledged e-commerce system. Shoptoit.ca estimates it can attract 36 per cent of Canadian shopping search engine traffic, or 56 million visitors, by 2008. “The Canadian market is very good,” said Johannson. “We search frequently and there are more people with high-speed Internet connections than just about anywhere. But it’s hard to find Canadian retailers in the mass of Google results.”
The company, the third successful Internet venture for Johannson, is aiming for revenues in the $15-million range by its third year of operation. But industry observers caution the market in Canada is much smaller than the U.S., which could limit the usefulness of the technology for some buyers. “The challenge will be to get as many retailers on board as possible so it truly is a comparative shopping engine,” said Toronto-based Internet consultant and author Rick Broadhead. “What’s going to be important is how useful the search functionality is. People won’t make a decision based on a list that isn’t comprehensive.”
Approximately 85 per cent of the Canadian Internet population use search engines; On average, they conduct 40 searches each month, totalling 574 million;
Some 21 per cent of searches are to either “comparison shop” or “make a purchase;”
More than 80 per cent of Canadian online shoppers prefer to buy from Canadian sites, citing high U.S. duties, costly exchange rates and a preference to keep money in the country
The top 10 U.S. shopping search engines attract more than 90 million shopping sessions per month; 8.4 million of them are from Canada.
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