High oil prices + credit crunch + housing crisis = Bad Feeling. But does that bad feeling = Good or Bad news for the shopping engines?
Overall, the US economy is not in great shape. That means that retail sales aren’t going to grow that much. Online sales growth will be stronger than offline sales growth as its a younger industry, but I’d be surprised to see much positive news come January.
The shopping engine industry, though, should still have a fairly impressive holiday shopping season (compared to overall ecommerce figures) as it’s still a growing online marketing channel for merchants and as much as shopping engines have evolved, they are still known as price comparison engines to most consumers.
So I’m not going to say that the shopping engines are recession proof, because they aren’t. But the shopping engines and the retailers who use them will perform fairly well over the next 6 weeks.
