Hi Brian,

Good to see someone is talking about pushing price comparission forward, we are a UK based comparision (unbeatable.co.uk) company and have been working on single cart software for the last 2 months.

I agree that Unified Shopping is a great innovation and much needed… Of course users would still have to pay shipping from each store I assume.

I think that the idea of “virtual mannequin” is a great one… But even a more simple approach would be like a niche social bookmarking site. Users could be browsing any clothing site (except flash-based ones), click a button and add the clothing item to one of their “outfit” lists to share with others. Women in particular seem to enjoy the idea.

Isn’t the ‘Payments’ issue a little separate from the ‘Unified Shopping Cart’ issue? Unless Google starts powering merchants’ checkout processes (as it would need to, like Yahoo Stores, Ebay and Amazon do), you can’t really provide unified shopping carts than span the sites of multiple self-powered merchants (ie, the guys that have their own independent platforms separate from a Yahoo/eBay/Amazon Stores platform).

I agree that PriceGrabber’s enabling of comparison of buying a basket of products from one seller vs multiple sellers is a cool product.

You’re right, Bob, definitely separate issues from a 50,000 foot level, but with Payments plus Google Base/Froogle plus Page Creator (pages.google.com), I think the unified shopping cart is one possible direction.

those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it.

yahoo shopping used to have a unified shopping cart. 2 things:
1 - merchants hated it, especially larger merchants
2 - consumers didn’t use it

this is no great hope.

I am not so sure ’someone’…

Merchants will hate it because it hands power back to the consumer but in the end its not the merchants vote that matters. They can fight the tide tooth and nail but eventually the ocean wins. The consumer will continue to drive toward anything that makes the market more efficient, leaving much less fat leftover for the merchant.

Consumers didn’t use Yahoo!’s cart because they didn’t shop online as regularly; the technology didn’t make sense and it was a big leap to even shop online and trust one merchant let alone using a multi-retailer cart. It was too early.

But I think Google has a plan here. Consumers are already creating an account with Google, perhaps unwittingly, by using the AutoFill feature which stores addresses and payment information and automatically completes checkout forms. This could be a baby step, one small and unsuspecting part of Google’s evil master plan. Once enough people are using Froogle to shop and the AutoFill feature to checkout, its a very short leap to get them to do both at the same place.

Nathan Decker
http://www.evogear.com

I don’t see the appeal of a unified shopping cart for the consumer either. Amazon already has one - you can buy from 30 merchants at one time, but people don’t care because you can’t get free shipping from them all.

Furthermore, speaking about apparrel, certainly it’s a women-dominated category. Why wouldn’t Gap and BananaRepublic unify their carts? Because it’s totally antethical to their brand strategy! Their customers would find it weird. What works for them is a constant stream of brand based email. Brand matters.

So I suspect this notion of the virtual mannequin and unified shopping cart is applying a man’s analytical view of comparison shopping to an area in which the primary demographic (women) don’t think that way at all…

In fact, brand is still so powerful in apparel, that I wonder if comparison shopping there is more than 5% of the transactions? 1%? It probably never will be very important.

I agree with John K.’s observation that apparel is a small segment in comparison shopping traffic. I also wanted to point out that it’s also a category where merchants are willing to pay less per click, as the clicking vs. buying ratio is much lower compared to electronics, photography, laptops, etc. (although margins are high). Investment in this field (mannequin etc.) is tricky and may not pay off.

I am also asking if apparel is a real comparison shopping category. I think that it really isn’t. We all need to note that unlike iPod Nano (just an example…), which is a single product that you can by from many vendors, a Gap shirt isn’t. This leads comparison shopping engines to offer an inferior service when a user searches for a pair of jeans, compared to when he or she search for an iPod: You can go to Nextag, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber or any other major comparison shopping engine and search for jeans. The result would be the same. You will not see a “Compare Prices” icon. Expect a “Go to Store”, “Shop Now” etc. instead. There is really no comparison shopping going on here, it’s just a list of different products from different vendors and unlike different digital cameras, there is not even a point in comparing them. No one is going to make a buying decision based on the fabric or the zipper color, unlike comparing pixels, weight, and screen size which is a handy feature in digital products.

Isn’t this what Shop.com already does, although it is though their website. They allow you to shop from a variety of different merchants using one cart and potentially only having to pay the highest of all the shipping fees.

Even though their catalog still seems to be quite limited, I think the concept is right. I wonder how they are looking to expand this concept and their brand, as it seems that the whole unified shopping cart concept is what they are singing as their major differentiator.

I like the mannequin idea. You could go further and offer the shopper the chance to place a photo of their head at the top. I have seen glasses websites do this for a better idea on whether a particular pari of glassed suits a customer or not.