Shopping is a time consuming activity especially when one is faced with a budget constraint and/or unfamiliarity of the product. In this aspect, comparison shopping is the safest thing to do. Shoppers need to gather information about the product and/or service to be purchased; and most importantly the quality and price information. In the traditional commerce world, the quality and price information are often hard to find, hence, buyers need to deal with retailers or product specialists to get them.

Current shopping search sites and the majority of retailers do a poor job of presenting shoppers with many options. Most sites make users scroll through ten product listings and then hit the ‘next’ button. This is fine if the user knows exactly what he is looking for, but is terrible for browsing. Furthermore, as displayed recently at Shop.org, the average web shopper doesn’t click the ‘next’ button (similar to the average web searcher not going past the first page or 2 of results).

Then there is the question of biased information. Users aren’t exposed to the wealth of products on a particular site, but rather only to the top 10 results in a particular category, which are often only listed because a couple merchants paid the most to the search engine.