Want to sell more stuff? List your competitors' prices, study says

A new study by Chicago-based strategy consultant The E-Tailing Group says online shoppers would vastly prefer to see comparative pricing — just like shopping.com, shown here– right on the sites where they buy, rather than going to a third-party site. The survey confirms my hunch that I’m not the only Web shopper who’d rather convince myself I’m paying a good price rather than put the work into looking around for a bargain.

Half of those surveyed said they would trust that the prices were not rigged in favor of the seller’s site.

The feature’s official jargon term is “Onsite Comparative Pricing,” or OCP. The E-Tailing Group summarizes:

“Shoppers no longer need to leave a retailer’s site to get a sense of the competition’s prices. While industry leaders including Amazon and Buy.com are providing this customer convenience on their product pages, technology solutions companies like WinBuyer are enabling other e-commerce sites to also experience the benefits of OCP through their own proprietary technology engine; offering a cost-effective alternative to building one’s own solution.”

But it’s these stats that sell the idea:

• 78% would be likely to return to a retailer that shows competitors’ prices on their website.
• 52% of consumers would find competitive prices on a retailer’s site to be credible.
• 53% of consumers would no longer feel compelled to comparison shop elsewhere.

Now what I want is a test, not a survey, in which retailers try hosting OCP and then report on how consumers really behave versus what they said they’d do.

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