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ShopToIt.ca is Canada’s most comprehensive shopping search engine. With over 1.6 million products and more than 200 Canadian retailers no other site compares. The website was launched on July 1st, 2005, to meet the needs of an underserved Canadian market and to bring a streamlined online shopping experience to Canadians. Statistics Canada estimates that total e-commerce sales increased by 38.4% to $39.2 billion in 2005 from 2004. This was the fourth year in a row that the overall value of e-commerce increased by 38% or more. In comparison, the increase in online sales was six times that of overall retail sales in Canada.
ShopToIt.ca has revenue sharing relationships to help power the shopping portal for Canada’s largest Internet properties including MSN Canada, AOL Canada, Lycos, SHAW, Telus, CanWest Global, and others. Brand name retailer’s like Indigo, Canadian Tire, Lush and Sears are using the ShopToIt.ca search engine to reach online Canadian shoppers.
Canadian Consumers are benefiting from ShopToIt.ca’s shopping comparisons, great deals and – ShopToIt.ca retailers deliver in Canada, from Canada with no duty, and no extra cross-border shipping costs.
ShopToIt.ca was created by Calgary-based entrepreneurs and business veterans, Clark Johannson, Scott Sanderson and Brendan Duddridge, under their software development and e-Commerce business Clickspace Interactive Inc. The company has successfully incubated two software organizations (RepeatSeat and StrataHealth Solutions) and developed a leading Internet marketing and E-commerce software (DriveIt Online Marketing Software).
According to a Global Market Insite survey, 98% of Canadians Consumers use a search engine to help research and/or buy a product or service. In addition, online shoppers prefer to buy from Canadian sites and the top two reasons why are because they are concerned with exchange rates, duties, tariffs and shipping costs and they prefer to keep money in Canada.
Before ShopToIt.ca, Canadians only had two options. They either had to sift through pages and pages of information to research, find, compare and select products using traditional search engines or they used U.S. shopping search engines – with listed retailers who may not ship to Canada or add expensive freight charges, currency conversions or cross-border taxes.
ShopToIt.ca is as easy to use as Google or Yahoo – just type in what you’re looking for or click on a category or sub-category to begin a search. The difference is that ShopToIt.ca generates a list of products exclusively from Canadian retailers rather than links to multiple websites. The Feature Filter on the ShopToIt.ca search engine allows a user to narrow down a product search based on various options and reduce huge lists of digital cameras down to 8 - 10 by filtering on product specifications like mega pixels.
Product results can be sorted based on the closest retail store, best deals, or most popular. The Comparison Clipboard allows for a side-by-side comparison of multiple products and it highlights the differences. When the online shopper is ready to buy they are immediately taken to the “buy now” page on the retailer’s site.
ShopToIt.ca employs the same proven Pay-Per-Click revenue model as traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The retailer is charged a referral fee when consumers click to view the product on the retailer’s site. The click-through charges are per click and based on the profitability and popularity of the product category.
Canada’s largest comparison shopping search engine, ShopToIt.ca, has created a level online market, consolidating and representing Canadian merchant partners from cottage industry operations to multinational chains. The direct sales force at ShopToIt.ca will help these merchants to increase visibility and generate more qualified referrals, producing a higher return on investment on a pay-for-performance based pricing system. The added convenience and ease of an uncluttered experience on ShopToIt.ca helps to turn online shoppers into online buyers.
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