Comparison Widgets – Changing the Way We Shop Online in 2021

Comparison widgets will make online shopping more accessible, more enjoyable and will save customers time and money.

As a result of the pandemic, the demand for online shopping tools and price comparison widgets has boomed. With the various lockdowns and restrictions, there has been a huge shift to online shopping. People not only want the best online shopping options but also the cheapest. Price comparison widgets provide a platform whereby readers can find content that is relevant and engaging for them.

Why do we need to adopt Comparison Widgets?

Journalists are having to multitask more than ever before – monitoring news stories, staying relevant, writing articles, taking pictures, filming videos, posting to socials and more recently, finding the b********* of products.

As publications begin to share their stories to a global audience, it is becoming increasingly challenging to understand which price to show and to whom. It’s a problem that many publishers are just starting to try, starting to understand and starting to get to grips with.

Price comparison widgets solve this problem. It automatically picks trustworthy retailers and the best product. This requires minimal effort for journalists and allows them to focus on what really matters – the content.

All publishers need to do is add the make and model of the product they want to feature into fields already present in their current CMS. These price comparison widgets then matched up the product, regularly checks for the latest price and will automatically show the right retailer and local price to the reader whether they are in the UK, US, or further afield.

The key challenges 

The biggest challenge publishers will face when implementing price comparison widgets is matching up the right products with the right request and then understanding those matches in different regions around the world. There is no centralized database for this information and every retailer and manufacturer tries to do it slightly differently.

Some price comparison tools are heavily flawed as they try to guess the prices based on words. This is a recipe for disaster. Many retailers incorrectly label their products and this will have a negative impact on price comparison tools that operate in this way.

Making sure you can cut through that chaos, make something both simple to use and deliver a good product for publishers and readers is hard. This is why publishers need to be careful when selecting their price comparison widget.

What price comparison and online shopping trends will be approaching in the next 5 years?

The world of online shopping has the potential to be epic.

It is currently all about the cheapest price from your local retailer and what the best deal is out there. However, as we get a better understanding of the products to recommend – on a more personal level – it will be easier to track down the deals and understand when something is likely to get cheaper based on historical data.

The last 12 months have made it evident that consumers have massively embraced online shopping. It’s only likely to get even bigger going forward as we embrace the technology within this sector.

So how will technology enhance online shopping?

Over the last 20 years, technology has completely transformed the way we shop.

Whether it’s technologies like Amazon’s One Click or online grocery retailer, Ocado’s use of robot pickers, the steady advance of technology has shown that everything is eventually possible.

As retailers look to embrace and adapt the technologies companies as Amazon have pioneered, you’re going to see huge advancements in how technology is used in the online shopping sector. Whether that’s about managing stock levels, improving deliveries, or creating personalized experiences, what we are currently seeing is only just the start of what’s next.

Comparison widgets will make online shopping more accessible, more enjoyable and will save customers time and money. The future of online shopping looks to be dominated by artificial intelligence, predicting the weather and delivering our shopping by drones. This is only the start.