Use Wiki Power To Find The Best Online Deals

Remember the old days when online shopping meant visiting just a handful of websites to find the item or product you were looking for?

Well, those days are long gone and the Internet has proliferated with e-commerce websites of all different varieties, level of quality and price-points.

The power of ShopWiki is to power through all of those sites to provide you with the ability to easily comparison shop and find the best deal for you -- whether your goal is to search for low prices or more selection.

Indexing more than 200,000 stores and more than 250 million products -- yes, 250 million -- ShopWiki boasts itself as the largest online shopping search engine.

Whether you are looking to buy automotive products, luggage, or a pair of jeans -- visit ShopWiki first.

This post was brought to you by your friends at ShopWiki.com.

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Buy Ceiling Fans Online

As we've covered here recently on Life, The Universe..., the Internet community is increasingly buying products online.

Did you know you can buy home improvement products over the Web, too?

That includes products like ceiling fans. Farrey's.com is a website that sells a variety of fans, from such makers as casablanca ceiling fans, craftmade fans, hunter ceiling fans and others.

Farrey's Wholesale Hardware Co., Inc. was founded in 1924 and based in Miami. Today they sell ceiling fans and other products online. They offer a 30-day return policy.

Buying your ceiling fans or other home improvement items online may be more convenient than visiting one of those confusing big box stores. You can buy them from home, have them delivered and then have an installer you trust do the work. (Or do it yourself!)

This post was brought to you by your friends at Farreys.com.

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More Than 875 Million Consumers Have Shopped Online

More than 85 percent of the world's online population has used the Internet to make a purchase -- increasing the market for online shopping by 40 percent in the past two years -- according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits. Globally, more than half of Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, according to Nielsen.

"The Internet is no longer a niche technology -- it is mass media and an utterly integral part of modern life. Almost no aspect of life remains untouched by online media. As our lives become more fractured and cluttered, it isn't surprising that consumers turn to the unrivaled convenience of the Internet when it comes to researching and buying products," says Jonathan Carson, president, international, Nielsen Online.

"When The Nielsen Company conducted its first global survey into Internet shopping trends two years ago, approximately 10 percent of the world's population (627 million) had shopped online," says Bruce Paul, vice president, customized research, Nielsen U.S. "Within two years, this number has increased by approximately 40 percent (to 875 million)."

Among Internet users, the highest percentage shopping online is found in South Korea, where 99 percent of those with Internet access have used it to shop, followed by the UK (97 percent), Germany (97 percent), Japan (97 percent) with the U.S. eighth, at 94 percent. Additionally, in South Korea, 79 percent of these Internet users have shopped in the past month, followed by the UK (76 percent) and Switzerland (67 percent) with the U.S. at 57 percent.

Globally, the most popular and purchased items over the Internet are books (41 percent purchased in the past three months), clothing/accessories/shoes (36 percent), videos / DVDs / games (24 percent), airline tickets (24 percent) and electronic equipment (23 percent).

Among Germany's Internet users, 55 percent say they bought books, 42 percent had bought Clothes/Accessories/Shoes and one in four had purchased Music/Videos/DVD's in the past three months.

During the same period, among Internet users in the UK, 45 percent bought books online, followed by Videos/DVDs/Games (44 percent), Clothing/Accessories/Shoes (38 percent), music (37 percent) and one in four Internet shoppers also purchased and airline tickets/reservations online.

Among U.S. Internet users in the past month, 41 percent bought Clothing/Shoes/Accessories, 38 percent bought books and one in three Internet shoppers bought Videos/DVDs/Games.

The number of Internet consumers buying books over the Internet has increased 7 percent in the past two years but the biggest increase has been in Clothing / Accessories / Shoes which increased from 20 percent to 36 percent. "Some of the biggest buyers of books on the Internet are from developing countries -- China, Brazil, Vietnam and Egypt -- indicating massive growth potential for online retailers that can specifically target these fast-growing markets," says Carson.

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Holiday Shopping Made Easy

You have so many options to buy holiday gifts online these days, it can be almost as time-consuming as getting your christmas gifts and other gift ideas in a traditional brick-and-mortar mall.


That's what makes Shopping.com so refreshing. Created by eBay, Shopping.com has been designed as an Internet one-stop shopping destination.


The site makes it as easy as possible for you to buy gifts. Particularly helpful is the site's feature of Top 20 gift ideas. The Top 20 has handbags, dresses and more for her; watches, golf clubs and power tools for him; and Transformers, Barbies and Webkinz for the kids.

Log on to Shopping.com and you might just find your holiday shopping is done all in one sitting.

This post was sponsored by your friends at Shopping.com.

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Online Shoppers Will Pay Extra to Protect Privacy, Carnegie Mellon Study Shows

People are willing to pay extra to buy items from online retailers when they can easily ascertain how retailers’ policies will protect their privacy, a new Carnegie Mellon University study shows.

Participants in the laboratory study used a Carnegie Mellon shopping search engine called Privacy Finder, which can automatically evaluate a Web site’s privacy policies and display the results on the search results page. The study, led by Lorrie Cranor, director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Lab, found that people were more likely to buy from online merchants with good privacy policies, which were identified by Privacy Finder.

They were also willing to pay about 60 cents extra on a $15 purchase when buying from a site with a privacy policy they liked.

Findings from the study, the first to suggest that people will pay a premium to protect their privacy when shopping online, will be presented Friday, June 8, at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, an international meeting hosted by Carnegie Mellon that begins Thursday, June 7. In addition to Cranor, the research team included Alessandro Acquisti, assistant professor of information technology and public policy, and graduate students Janice Tsai and Serge Egelman.

Many people express concerns that unscrupulous online merchants might misuse credit information, target spam to their email addresses or otherwise violate their privacy. But a number of previous studies have found that many people still fail to act to protect their privacy online. Some have shown that people willingly give up private information in return for lower prices or even the mere chance of a monetary reward.

“Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it’s often difficult for them to get information about a Web site’s privacy policies,” says Cranor, an associate research professor of computer science and of engineering and public policy. A Web site’s policies may not be readily accessible, can be hard to interpret and sometimes are nonexistent, Cranor says. “People can’t act on information that they don’t have or can’t understand,” she adds.

Privacy Finder is a search engine developed by Cranor and her students to address this issue. The engine makes use of the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), a technical standard for creating machine-readable privacy policies. About 10 percent of Web sites overall and more than 20 percent of e-commerce sites now employ P3P, Cranor says, and of the top 100 most-visited Web sites, about a third use P3P.

The search engine can automatically read and evaluate the policies of Web sites that employ P3P, and it displays this information as a series of colored squares that indicate to the user whether the site’s privacy policy complies with his or her privacy preferences.


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