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Holiday Shopping Gets An Early Start

August... hot sun, beach blankets, barbeques and... holiday shopping? Absolutely!

According to Nielsen/Netratings more than 21 million online users, or 16 percent of active U.S. Internet users, visited one or more comparison shopping sites in August at work and at home.

Shoppers are gearing up for the holidays by visiting online shopping comparison sites to research products, prices, and merchants.

Where are they stopping in their pre-shopping searches?

• Shopping.com (formerly DealTime) attracted 11.9
  million unique visitors from home and work;
• BizRate Shopping garnered 5.9 million visitors during the same month;
• NexTag, drawing in 4.6 million consumers;
• PriceGrabber grew 81 percent during the past year to
  attract 3.9 million shoppers.

The ten top comparison sites as a group grew 34 percent from August 2002 to August 2003, as more consumers used multiple comparison shopping sites.

“Shopping comparison sites are no longer just about comparing price,” said Robert Leathern, director of commerce analytics, Nielsen/NetRatings. “Consumers want to examine features and functionality along with user and merchant reviews.”

Not all of the net surfers in August were window shopping. Amazon and eBay remain the dominant online commerce sites, attracting 42.6 million and 26.1 million consumers respectively in August.

“Consumers also focus a great deal of their online product research on finding ballpark prices for products they actually buy offline," Leathern explained. "Shopping comparison sites and portal shopping sites are thus having an increasing impact not just online, but on purchases made in stores as well.”

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