If you object to adult content, hit your back button now!
I have to say that looking at adult products while sitting in Starbucks in Sunnyvale, CA has been an adventure in social decorum!
In this post, I’ll look at the adult product offerings of the main shopping comparison engines. I also encourage you to check out my Q&A with Adrian Yearwood of vdeep.com, the first adult shopping comparison engine.
Shopzilla, in my opinion, is by far the leader as the company has meticulously categorized adult products and serves up proper warning before displaying the results. The section is organized into seven categories: Arts, Books & Videos, Erotic Lingerie, Games, Herbal Sex Enhancers, Lubricants, Novelty, Other, Safe Sex, Sensory Simulation, and Sex Toys. Shopzilla even provides a list of the top searches within the category. I have to wonder what Scripps thinks of all this.
Shopping.com doesn’t seem to have a mature/adult category, but you can find many adult products under Personal Care and Adult Movies and obviously through a search. I wonder if eBay knows about how Shopping.com handles adult products. eBay’s Mature Audiences policy states that adult products must be in the Mature Audience area and requires that “a user provide credit card information or alternative verification in order to enter the Mature Audiences area. This helps to ensure that minors are not freely accessing adult material.” Considering eBay’s policy, it’s probably not good that Shopping.com doesn’t have a dedicated Mature Audiences area (or at least one that I could find) or any warning to consumers…especially now that eBay links to Shopping.com from its homepage.
PriceGrabber has a vast selection of adult movies, but it’s hard to find other adult products besides the occassional vibrator or sex game.
Froogle offers ‘no holds barred’ adult shopping. Froogle might actually be the most comprehensive site for adult products, but because of poor categorization, the site seems weak. Doing a search for sex puts you in the Books, Music, and Video -> Videos -> Adult section as opposed to providing you with multiple categories which might satisfy your search. Also, does Sex and the City really belong in this section?
NexTag has a strong adult offering with most products falling under the Health & Beauty, Books, or Movies section. The problem here, though, is that the adult products seem to be mixed in with lots of non-adult products; I couldn’t find a dedicated Adult section as I found on Shopzilla.
Yahoo! Shopping is almost completely adult free. Doing a search for an adult oriented term serves up no results. However, if you get creative, you can find an adult oriented product or 2.
As you can see, almost all of the leading shopping comparison engines have adults products although they are usually a bit hidden and therefore it’s usually easier to search rather than browse. I have to applaud Shopzilla for being a leader in this category in terms of categorization and selection as well as safety. Adding the warning (seen above) is smart. Yahoo! has opted not to list adult products which I find a little odd considering that they allow adult listings in their directory (although at a premium).
So what’s the point of this? Well, adult content is the unspoken elephant in the closet of every search engine. The situation doesn’t seem to be any different for the shopping comparison engines. And with Amazon’s decision this summer to bring adult products more to the forefront, I thought this would make an interesting story. Let me know what you think.
We definitely need a shopping comparison search engine just for adult products. We have sex toys sites and have found it very tough to get our items listed in any of the shopping comparison sites you mentioned. It’s fairly easy to get by with listing vibrators as you can list them as massagers and listing lubricants is fairly easy but they end up in a category whereas the shopper is not looking for sex novelties or sexual lubricants.
The vdeep.com adult comparison shopping engine you mentioned does not list products sold by businesses in the US. Someone needs to get on the ball and build a shopping comparison engine for the US – could be a good money maker.