Last week Shopping.com announced that by the holiday shopping season they will have a shopping cart system in place on their site, according to ecommerce-guide. This means customers will be able to select items from multiple online stores, add them to a shopping cart and complete the transaction all without visiting the stores’ sites. The vice president of Shopping.com’s US Business unit, Rob Goldman, tells ecommerce-guide,

“This is a trifecta win because the customers don’t get frustrated and confused by going through numerous pages and check-outs,” says Goldman, “the merchants benefit because they sell more, and we win because we are in the business of keeping the relationship between e-tailers and customers running smoothly.”

Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. As a customer I would love to buy items from across multiple sites and only have to complete a transaction. Of course Shopping.com will win because it will generate more traffic. But I have a hard time believing this development is beneficial to merchants.

For the sake of argument let’s agree with Rob and say merchants who sign up will sell more. The fact that merchants who sign up will only pay-per-acquisition, as opposed to the current pay-per-click model, is definitely a plus. The problem is that merchants will no longer be competing over customer service or branding, but over lowest price. This is basically making merchants into eBay sellers, something ecommerce store owners have spent a lot of money differentiating themselves from. I wonder why Shopping.com would want to model themselves after eBay, even going as far as using PayPal for the payment system? Oh ya…

Related: ComparisonEngines.com has a great post on the topic and points out something I had missed. Not only will merchants be “ceding customer ownership to Shopping.com”, but they will also lose the ability to