It’s not the chill in the air nor the twinkle in anyone’s eye. Rosy
cheeks having nothing to do with it.
The best way to tell the holidays are coming—other than a drive past
your nearest mall—is to launch a browser and visit the many shopping
search engines pining for your patronage.
As the calendar turns to November, they’re all upgrading their
services too look shiny and new.
Today, Yahoo followed suit with a newly redesigned Yahoo! Shopping.
In a statement Yahoo said that 60 percent of Shopping users consider
themselves “bargain hunters” and that it’s for those users the
company added a new “Bargain Center.”
The Bargain center aggregates sales, coupons, free shipping offers,
rebates and more from across the Internet.
With the Bargain Center, users can search by merchant, type of
product or item popularity to find what they are looking for, as well
as search coupons by merchants to find bargains from specific brands and retailers.
And with the service update, users of My Yahoo! can add a Popular
Products and Deals module from Yahoo! Shopping to their My Yahoo! page.
Yahoo Shopping also now features a tighter integration with Yahoo
Answers, an increasingly popular question and answer exchange
the company set up last summer.
Yahoo is hardly the only shopping site to upgrade its services before
this holiday season. For example, Become.com CEO Michael Yang told
internetnews.com his site’s search-by-color capability sets it
apart from Yahoo and its competition.
Meanwhile, American ecommerce has continued its rapid growth through the third quarter of this year when online
retail spending increased 23 percent to $23.1 billion.
And it’s not supposed to slow down any time soon, forecasted to reach
approximately $170 billion for the year.
