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Headlines
by moreover
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Web Site
Review
Egghead.com  
(3-1/2 of 4) |
 One
of the smartest moves Egghead.com
made was to merge with the electronics auction house Onsale.com
back in 1999. Egghead had retail stores still open and
was also competing against Onsale's incredible ability to
move merchandise through it's auction services. The only problem
for Onsale was, when the liquidation sources dried up, so
did the revenues from the auctions. The current Egghead site
is a great combination of regular computer products, clearance
items and auctions. When you conduct a search on Egghead,
the results are grouped into those three different categories
for convenient viewing.
A feature that gets overlooked on many ecommerce sites
is the ability to use boolean
operators on your searches to help filter out items you
don't want to see. Egghead has offered this for years
now. It makes the difference of seeing all IBM products, or
only ones with "desktop" associated with them. Try
writing it like this: "IBM desktops" –notebooks.
And Egghead
has always done a nice job of sorting the results and making
it easy to get to the item you're interested in. The site
has many great features. Unfortunately, sometimes takes a
while to give you your results back, either by browsing or
searching.
Once unique in the online auction world, they were one
of the first to offer a feature that allows you to monitor
your auctions, and automatically adjust your bid price to
a specific limit. This is a common feature now, but back
in 1998 (when it was Onsale.com) it was a real time-saver.
And why 3-1/2 stars instead of four? The site could
load a little faster, even though they've made a good effort
at reducing the amount of graphics that have to load, too.
It would be great to see just a text version of the site,
for pure speed. Most surfers/buyers know what they want, and
getting there fast is sometimes difficult when pages take
longer than 20 seconds to load. Blame it on 15-second commercials
and shorter attention spans, but we cyber-shoppers are an
impatient bunch.
Try it on our Channel Engine above
and do a search for your favorite item right now.
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