Now CHOICE’S members and visitors will be able to purchase those products online armed with the best prices from the most suitable retailers.

The consumer group has announced it is teaming up with leading comparison shopping site Getprice in a partnership that will provide price information about a range of products with an option to purchase.

“This partnership with Getprice will provide members and visitors a channel to instantly find the best value for products that CHOICE has tested and recommended from Getprice’s database of over two million products from 1000 retailers,” says CHOICE’s commercial director George Perry.

“By going to the CHOICE website, Australians will be able to read the test reviews and select a product. By clicking on ‘Price and Buy’, a price comparison page will display the product and prices supplied by retailers – both online and in physical stores – as well as information detailing their warranty, service and delivery terms.”

The CHOICE site will also give information about shopping tips on what to look out for before making an online purchase.

“This is an added benefit for CHOICE members and visitors – a one-stop-shop where you can read the latest product reviews, find the best price for those products and then make a purchase if you wish,” says Perry.

CEO of Getprice Chris Hitchen says CHOICE readers can make their online purchasing decisions knowing they have the best available information.

“By partnering with CHOICE, a powerful platform is created where consumers can access credible, independent product reviews from CHOICE alongside the most comprehensive and up-to-date pricing information powered by Getprice.

“CHOICE is Australia’s leading consumer advocacy group and we are looking forward to developing this valuable relationship to the benefit of consumers and retailers alike.”

The shopping comparison service begins this week with CHOICE’s latest review of refrigerators.

Through its partnership with Getprice, Yahoo!7 furthers its goal of partnering with industry leaders and innovators.

The new destination will be available on the Yahoo!7 Network and will provide independent price comparisons for over 2.4 million products from 1000 merchants in 500 individual categories.

The site will also fully integrate with Yahoo!7 Answers. Each time a visitor searches for a product on the Yahoo!7 Shopping site, the same search will be conducted on Answers to find questions and answers about the product. The integration of Yahoo!7 Answers will provide Yahoo!7 shoppers with more pre-purchase information about what they are looking for, and help them make the decision about what to buy at what price and from what store, even easier. This will create a strong social comparison shopping experience.

Yahoo!7 National Media Sales Director Damon Scarr said, “We’re very pleased to be able to announce our partnership with Getprice today. This new agreement will further enhance the wealth of ‘at your fingertips’ information accessible through the Yahoo!7 site. Getprice’s merchants are trusted, reliable retailers and we believe its impartial, independent price and product comparisons will help our audience be fully informed when making online purchasing decisions.”

Chief executive officer of Getprice, Chris Hitchen added, “At Getprice we pride ourselves on forming high quality partnerships within the online retail industry and this is an extension of that. Our partnership with Yahoo!7 extends our marketing reach for our retailers into Yahoo!7’s qualified, engaged audience and provides this audience access to the millions of products available on our site.”

Getprice includes some of Australia’s biggest retail brands such as Big W, Dick Smith Electronics, Rebel Sport, Officeworks, Supercheap Auto, Bing Lee, Apple, Dell, Charlie Brown, Clinique, Hewlett Packard, Billabong and Sony.

The new Getprice site on Yahoo!7 is available now at the following link: http://whitelabels.getprice.com.au/yahoo

Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

Mikal Belicove asked Googler, Matt Cutts  how this will impact businesses:

“The main difference is that businesses will see searchers arriving faster on their websites because Caffeine can index pages much more quickly than our previous system. The nice thing is that Google users will see fresher results without users (or business owners) needing to do anything special.

Business owners can find ways to put this additional freshness to work for them. For example, owners might want to consider putting limited-time promotions on their website, since people will be able to find those promotions more quickly while they still apply.”

On the surface, the site looks great with a number of listings for various real estate agents and portals, however upon closer inspection there are a couple of noticeable omissions from the listings, namely the two gorillas of online real estate,  realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.

Patrick Stafford from SmartCompany spoke with former chief executive of REA Group, Simon Baker who views Google Maps as a competitor but not a major threat:

“You have to think about this one logically. For this to shake up the market, for it to have real impact on realestate.com.au or domain.com.au, it has to take away visitors to those sites and therefore leads, and then have agents have to stop using them. Firstly, for consumers or visitors to stop using domain.com.au or realestate.com.au, they’re going to have access to an equal number of listings on Google maps. Currently they’re not there yet.”

According to The Real Estate Marketing Maven, agents, franchises, marketing groups, and listing portals can upload their property listings through Google Base, either a formatted data feed or via the Google Base Data API. Listings are then displayed on a map when a user conducts a search using Google Maps.

Although widely adopted overseas, this is the first implementation of Google Base’s functionality in Australia (that we’re aware of).  Is a local version of Google’s Product Search in the works as well?

Reporting a massive 2.7 million people shopping for the month of June, getprice.com.au has seen an increase of traffic of more than 500% to the site from June 2008.

“As one of Australia’s fastest growing websites, we are seeing a huge increase in consumers coming to us to make their money go further,” said getprice.com.au Chief Executive, Chris Hitchen.

“Knowledge is power when making purchase decisions and consumers want to be able to see all their options quickly. This is with good reason too with consumers saving up to 60% by going online and comparing before completing their purchase.”

“From electronics to perfume – www.getprice.com.au can deliver consumers with thousands of product comparisons in a matter of seconds.”

Shopping trends reported by www.getprice.com.au in June:

• Australians are heading indoors to exercise in the winter months with treadmills being the most popular sports and travel product, followed by pilates machines and exercise bikes.
• Panasonic, Cannon and Olympus digital cameras remain extremely popular with their products being in the top ten most search electronic items.
• The traditional trampoline remains the most popular product for Aussie kids, followed by swings and scooters.
• Perfumes such as Gucci Flora by Gucci, Issey Miyake L’Eau D’Issey and Giorgio Armani Acqua were the most popular health and beauty products
• Sony Playstation topped the computer and games category – followed by the Asus EE Laptop, HP Mini 2140 and Acer 5533

Read the full Press Release here