“Ciao!” The European Shopping Comparison Site

How do we, as consumers, evaluate and make the final decision as to whether or not to purchase a product? What brands do we choose from? How sensitive are variables, such as price and quality, to us?

Everyone’s method of choosing a final product varies. We may rely more on other factors than others, or take into consideration what others have to say about the product than trusting our own judgement. We may search countlessly for every detail about the product until we are satisfied and confident of our decision, or we may impulse purchase on goods that have little to none evaluation process because it is a common necessity to us. Do we choose based on our brand loyalty or are we still in search for the right one?

In my e-marketing class, we previously covered McKinsey Quarterly’s, “The Consumer Decision Journey”, and it mentioned one of the traditional methods that consumers took to evaluate a product before purchase:

The reason why this method of evaluation has become “traditional” is because with the increasing amount of internet usage consumers undertake before product purchase, the number of brands under consideration during the active-evaluation phase can actually increase rather than decrease. Consumers are constantly searching and being influenced by information, whether it be through word of mouth of reading online customer reviews, in order to help their decision making process. Overall, these brands can jump into the consideration phase and potentially force rival brands out. Therefore, here’s the new version of the McKinsey graph:

According to the article, “The Consumer Decision Journey”, on the McKinsey Quarterly:

Two-thirds of the touch points during the active-evaluation phase involve consumer-driven activities such as Internet reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family.

I came across this website: www.ciao.co.uk

“Ciao” is one of the most popular European comparison websites, largely because it contains more than 2,600 online retailers. They’re a consumer-oriented website that allows shoppers to find reviews, ratings, and price comparisons for goods they can buy elsewhere online. How popular are they? Well, approximately they receive over 26.4 million unique visitors per month from seven countries. In addition, they’ve developed their own online community where Ciao users can review and post their experiences with the product with other Ciao users.

As I was checking out their website, I came across a few take aways that in my opinion, made them an effective website:

• Consumer video and written reviews: The site consists of a user generated 5 point-system rating solely for the product itself (consisting of 2 types of graphs: “a rating summary” and “a detailed characteristic specific rating”). In addition, users have the ability to organize reviews by “most helpful review first” or “newest first”
• Product recommendations based on what other users have bought: What I found extremely effective of this is that not only does Ciao recommend other products that similar users have bought, but also, recommends products that are similar to the characteristics of your own. For example, I searched “Samsung Galaxy S3” and came up with the option to browse various other phones which had similar camera resolution, battery life, and price.
• A “Recommendation” Counts feature: This feature allows Ciao users to hit “Recommend” for the specific product and merchant and see the total number of recommendations for it.
• Price comparisons from multiple sellers and a link to additional offers from the same merchant of the product