Chris Sherman reviews the new players in shopping and comparison search and notes Become.com as the most impressive due to it’s approach and differentiation from other services. The engine offers two options allowing you to “research” or “shop.” In addition to offering the usual product and price comparison capabilities, Become.com has created its own index of shopping-related content found on the web. Once a user has completed their “research” process they can switch over easily to the “shop” function.
Brilliant Shopper, launched in April 2005, aggregates product offers, coupons and other content from other sources.

BuySafeShopping.com launched in August provides listing exclusively from bonded sellers. BuySafeShopping.com currently features approximately 1.5 million Bonded Items, and transactions are guaranteed up to $25,000 per listing.
Smarter.com has expanded the number of product categories it covers has added coupons and a SMS service that sends the lowest price found for a product directly to your cell phone.
Unlike most product comparison services that focus on “how much” and “where to buy,” ViewScore starts earlier in the shopping process, focusing on the “what to buy?” question. ViewScore crawls and indexes reviews and user testimonials from hundreds of sources on the web, and analyzes this information to come up with a numerical score that reflects a review’s positive or negative opinion of a product.

Read Full Article >>