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What Retailers Don't Tell Consumers.

Article Excerpt
Theory: The Web is the great equalizer and, given the opportunity to access comprehensive, accurate and unbiased information about products they want to buy, consumers will choose to buy the products that are best for them, given price, features and various other details.

But is that really the case? It's clear that the larger retailers have an edge, with well-known brands and the relative comfort-food-security belief that they'll be around to stand behind the product later. Well, probably not, but at least they are seen as being more than some vendor that the customer has never heard of.

So let's fine-tune the question. Do consumers have a strong preference to buying from a particular large retailer, even if they believe a better product exists elsewhere?

We're not talking brick-and-mortar here, where parking and location--especially in these high-gas-price days--can have a huge impact on convenience. We're talking one retailer's online site compared with another, where they are all equally convenient. With the effort required to surf to another site so minimal, would any retailer's customer be so loyal as to pass up more attractive product offers at another large, comfortable national retail brand?

Joe Chin, CEO of Guidester, argues that they would. Guidester is a paid-search company that began life as Decidia. The company's core product is an extensive consumer product database finds for customers the...

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