AOL Will Launch New Comparison Shopping Search Site Next Week

[garyp]

AOL Expands Shopping Features
Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/te...ner=ALTAVISTA1

It's called In-Store.com and will launch next Monday.

It will be AOL's first offering to consumers who want to research products side by side before buying.


In-Store will include elements of both a traditional online shopping mall, with an array of products and featured merchants, and a comparison shopping engine, which allows users to select attributes of, say, digital cameras, then choose from a short list of products that fit the bill.

Shoppers also can click to select a product category. On each page, a drop-down box called "Pinpoint Shopping" will help shoppers narrow a universe of more than 45,000 online sellers with combined inventories of 25 million items.

Shoppers can test a version of Pinpoint Shopping now, at PinpointShopping.com. The site also allows AOL members to save products to a single Web page, so they can compare them side by side or simply build a wish list - a feature that will be available to non-AOL users when In-Store rolls out.

AOL registered the In-Store.com domain in 2001.

I think shopping is going to be another major growth area in the search business in the next couple of years along with Local, desktop applications, and International. I like the move by AOL.