Google, Amazon & Ebay

When purchasing products online companies attempt to provide customers with as much useful data as they deem necessary. Companies like Best Buy, Amazon and eBay all provide generally similar information, but additional information is provided based on the company's primary of sales method. Customer product reviews are one piece of extremely valuable data for making purchases that is provided by all three companies. One difference is that since Best Buy is a retailer that primarily focuses on driving sales through physical stores and they have a place where customers can go to physically touch and feel their products, they have the ability to provide information that is less extensive on their website. For example, when searching for a CD at bestbuy.com you can view the CD's track listing. On amazon.com the same thing is true except they go one step further to allow you to actually listen to the track. It is possible that Best Buy doesn't go through setting up sound bites for the songs because their customers will typically go into a store to hear songs of the CD.

Due to the nature of the business of eBay and used products on Amazon, they are almost required to have seller's ratings. This is a very useful piece of information that is typically only implemented when purchasing from a private party. By having these ratings a buyer usually, with good reason, chooses from whom to buy their product based upon them. This is not a practice usually implement buy a retailer like Best Buy because they are the direct company. It is not a typical practice to post comments about the customer service or shipping service received from a direct retailer.

I think each of the three retailers previously mentioned have sufficient information for making an educated purchase decision. The sources of the data provided come from 3 avenues, either the company itself, a customer who has purchased merchandise or a seller selling merchandise. I think the validity of the information is all very credible, but as with any retailer, information should be double-checked and cross referenced with information from similar sites.

The data collected by Google is in a different category than Amazon and eBay. They do commonly track the number of hits on different links to determine popularity of its sites/products. It seems as though Google is more of an avenue to retrieve or find information available as opposed to actually providing the information.