55 Percent Of Online Shoppers Start Their Product Searches On Amazon (recode.net)

Another year, another data point showing Amazon has surpassed Google as the default search engine for shopping, a report on Recode reads. Fifty-five percent of people in the U.S. now start their online shopping trips on Amazon.com, according to results from a 2,000-person survey commissioned by the e-commerce startup BloomReach. That stat marks a 25 percent increase from the same survey last year, when 44 percent of online shoppers said they turned to Amazon first. From the report: Over the same time, the percentage of shoppers who start product searches on search engines like Google dropped from 34 percent to 28 percent. The number of online shoppers who check out a retailer's website (other than Amazon) first also shrunk, from 21 percent to 16 percent.

Comments

No such thing as free shipping

[sjbe]

Amazon is only free shipping if you're prime. (and if you're prime you're paying a whopping $100 a year in most cases).

Whether or not the Prime fees are a good deal depends on how much you shop on Amazon. Last year I ordered 155 packages from Amazon which were delivered via Prime. That means my per-parcel shipping cost was $0.65 each. That's barely more than a first class stamp. That is a good price by any reasonable measure.

There really is no such thing as "free" shipping. Either the shipping is rolled into the cost of the product you are buying or you pay for it separately but either way you are still paying for the shipping.

It's all about the reviews.

[Beardo the Bearded]

I check amazon first because they have more product reviews than anywhere else. For me, it's the reviews, not always the price or shipping rate, that get me to buy something.