Today and for the next few days people will be using a wide range of tools and resources — hopefully not pepper spray — to help them determine what and where to buy to get the best prices on items on their holiday shopping lists. This year there are more tools, sites and mobile apps than ever it would seem. Indeed, there’s just no way to deal with all the online shopping sites and apps comprehensively in one post, but here’s a sample of what’s out there.

Search: where it all starts

Google just this week beefed up its Product Search site with a number of new features and capabilities. Product Search now has more information and is much more “visual” than it used to be (courtesy of the shuttered Boutiques.com). The home page of Google Product Search doesn’t feature any Black Friday specific information but it does promote Google Offers, the useful Google Shopper mobile app and the recently relaunched Google Catalogs for the iPad.

Google Product Search and Google general search results also show information about where you can buy items in stock at nearby stores. This is a nice feature of Google’s product search that isn’t available on Yahoo or Bing.

However if you’re looking for Black Friday information Google Product Search isn’t a great place to start. Yahoo has much more Black Friday content, including a dedicated deals site with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. All same information is also accessible from the main Yahoo Shopping site.

You can browse all the Black Friday ads online in one place on Yahoo, albeit in a somewhat awkward scanned-pdf format. Probably the best place to see all the Black Friday Ads in a browse-able and searchable format is ShopLocal.com. It’s not a great user-experience but it gets the job done. The Black Friday sites also have all or almost all the ads online as well.

Not as good as ShopLocal but better than Yahoo, Bing does good job with formatting and presenting the weekly “circular” retailer information, including Black Friday ads. However the “circular” information is unfortunately quite limited. Luckily there is a dedicated Black Friday-Cyber Monday section in Bing Shopping that also features some editorial picks.

You can, of course, also use Google, Yahoo and Bing to search for “Black Friday Ads” or “Black Friday Deals” sites. There are dozens of them (e.g., BlackFriday2011).

Shopping engines: Amazon, eBay and beyond

Amazon is the most aggressive of the online shopping sites, with loads of Black Friday specials including hourly “lightening deals.” Amazon also has a range of iPad and mobile apps for your cross-platform shopping convenience.

These include Windowshop for the iPad, the Amazon Mobile app and several other mobile apps. For example Amazon Deals allows you to rapidly flip through Amazon’s Gold Box and Lightening Deals on your smartphone. There’s also Amazon Price Check for in-store price comparisons.

Amazon rival eBay is also featuring Black Friday deals and daily deals on its home page. PayPal, which is owned by eBay, also has shopping and deals. However, PayPal mainly uses email to promote shopping to its existing users. There are no Black Friday specific promotions apparently.

There are numerous mobile apps from eBay including RedLaser, a barcode scanning app that offers an expanding array of content and functionality (i.e., pricing, reviews and local inventory data). The local inventory data is from eBay’s Milo.com and is available online (though buried) and through a dedicated Milo mobile app, in addition to RedLaser.

Shopping comparison engine PriceGrabber has a Black Friday-Cyber Monday section. Nextag is also offering some Black Friday deals. However most of the shopping engines seem to be sitting out Black Friday-Cyber Monday in terms of specific promotion. That includes eBay’s Shopping.com. As an aside, one of the best sites for general online shopping and price comparisons is TheFind, which also has a mobile app and a local store inventory finder.

Mo-Lo: mobile apps and local inventory sites

In addition to those already mentioned there is an ever growing list of shopping-related mobile apps. Most major retailers now have mobile apps, which typically include sale and deals information. And most of them will have their Black Friday deals there too. There are also at least 10 Black Friday specific mobile apps in the iTunes store right now, the highest rated of which is TGI Black Friday.

ShopSavvy is another mobile app that offers deals, as well as local store inventory data and newspaper weekly circular information. The app also features a barcode scanner that accesses price and product reviews content. Goodzer is another site and mobile app that tells you what stores carry products locally. It doesn’t guarantee real-time inventory information, but claims to have a larger catalog of local products than any of its competitors.

There are also a number of mobile apps that offer venue maps to get you efficiently around the mall so don’t get frustrated and have to use pepper spray on your fellow shoppers. Among them are: Micello, Point Inside and FastMall. Point Inside also features local deals content.

Decide.com, from the people who created travel site Farecast (acquired by Microsoft), will tell you whether you should buy a gadget or electronics item now or wait, based on historical pricing data. It also includes a barcode scanner and features product revenues and nearby local inventory data.

Foursquare and Shopkick are running special promotions in conjunction with credit card issuers Amex and Visa respectively. Foursquare’s is part of a promotion tied to “Small Business Saturday,” which sits between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Most of the above-mentioned apps are also available in the Android Market.

Deal sites: where every day is Black Friday

Among the top daily deal sites only LivingSocial seems to be doing a Black Friday specific set of promotions. Groupon is offering its normal deals. That generally seems to be the case for the other major deal and “flash sale sites” that I checked.

However Groupon anticipates a big holiday season and expects that consumers will be giving deals (in the form of services and experiences or Groupon purchase credit) in addition to more traditional gifts.

That’s more than enough information to digest. If I were to write more and you were to spend more time reading this you’d be delayed in getting out there and grabbing the deals before they’re gone. However if you’re reading this on a mobile device you may already be in the store or in a checkout line.

Some people have already been shopping all night. But if you haven’t started yet, here’s a little taste of what you may be in for: SNL’s mock Black Friday ad from last season.

The mobile deals experience hasn’t really changed; you can see daily deals in  your selected area, as well as deals “nearby” and also browse deals by category. It’s available via the m.bing.com HTML5 site and Bing apps.

There’s a new more comprehensive online experience integrated into Bing Shopping on the PC however. It seeks to bring deals, coupons and retail sales data together in a single place. Users can search and browse for deals by product/brand, category and store.

Daily deals has largely been a “push” email marketing phenomenon and it’s now evolving into a broader experience where users can search and browse deals more proactively. Groupon Now and LivingSocial Instant, as well as several others, are making deals more “pull-oriented” or search-friendly — which is what Bing is also doing.

Yesterday Google relaunched Google Shopping, integrating some of the design elements of its soon-to-be closed Boutiques.com, with more content and features. Google’s daily deals product, Google Offers, is also integrated into the revamped shopping site. However the content is much more limited than what Bing is doing with deals.

Often forgotten, Yahoo has long offered deals and discounts as part of its experience, pre-dating both Google and Bing’s efforts.

Ask.com also sought to become the most comprehensive deals site online, in 2009. But this was before daily deals and deal mania really took off. The company’s timing was off and the effort largely failed. IAC sister company Citysearch has a mobile deals app and also aggregates deals online from various third party sources.

There are also a number of independent deal aggregators including Yipit, Local Offer Network and Savings.com among others.

We can probably expect that Google will ultimately do a version of what Bing is now doing, combining its own Offers with deal aggregation in Google Shopping and in mobile (and ultimately Google Places). This may be telegraphed by acquisition of deal aggregator The Dealmap (which Microsoft apparently was also interested in according to rumor).

Bing’s deals tab in Shopping is likely to be extremely popular as we head into the holiday shopping season. A bad economy and other factors suggest that many consumers will be looking for deals and discounts as an important part of their shopping consideration process.

Postscript: I was contacted by Microsoft to clarify that Bing continues to have a relationship with The Dealmap but has begun incorporating many more deal sources:

Bing Deals also include deals from deal sites such as Tippr, Groupon, Living Social, Zozi, Gilt City along with deals from over 2000 merchants through Bing Shopping including Target, Nordstrom, and Zappos to name a few.

• Refine Your Searches Faster
• Find Sale Prices
• Share Your Shopping Lists on Facebook

Bing Shopping has added a form of Google Instant results for shopping refinements. Here is an example:

You can also just filter by sales, see the screen shot below showing sales prices in red:

Finally, you can build your shopping lists and share them on Facebook.

Here is a video demo of how it works:

It isn’t news that Bing is integrating the Facebook data; that was originally announced in October last year. Rather the news today is that Bing is entering a kind of “phase II” of the process, doing some more interesting and potentially useful things with Likes.

According to Microsoft, which spoke to us about the changes and also has done a blog post, there are three components of the new, more social Bing experience:

• Trusted Friends
• Collective IQ
• Enabling Conversations

“Trusted Friends”

Trusted Friends stands for deeper and broader integration of your networks’ Likes. The objective is to reduce noise and clutter by showing results that are preferred by members of your network. This was extensively discussed back in October during the original announcement.

Microsoft says that “Bing shows the faces of up to three of your friends that like a search result, offering a visual, virtual seal of approval from your trusted social network” (see  image below).

Search results are also being re-ranked based on Likes. Microsoft discussed this in principle last year when it first introduced Facebook data into search results.

Now, as a practical matter however, Bing is elevating Liked results if they’re associated with people in your network. For example, an hotel, news story, restaurant or brand that has been Liked by someone in your network and appears on page two of a search result or below it may now be elevated to page one. This is completely specific to your network and won’t affect others’ results.

The SEO implications of Likes are thus more obvious than ever, at least in terms of Bing.

“Collective IQ”

Collective IQ refers to the presentation of aggregated Facebook data: most popular sites, stories and so on. It’s the wisdom of the crowd in total and not just the opinions of your personal Facebook network.

Because people in your network may not have any experience with the thing you’re searching for the Collective IQ effort can provide a useful additional source of information or recommendations.

“Enabling Conversation”

The third category, which Microsoft is calling “enabling conversation,” is the most involved but in some ways the most intriguing aspect of all of this. Simply put Bing is seeking to enable people to quickly identify those people in their network who may be able to help them in making a decision or providing advice.

Bing is providing an expanded Facebook profile search capability with a longer bio, including details about your friends’ locations, education, employment and so on. The idea is to find someone who might be knowledgeable about a desired subject.

There are also vertical-specific features on Travel and Bing Shopping designed to help people interact around buying decisions:

• Bing Travel Wish List: You can compare trips with friends on Facebook, get their input, suggest new destinations for friends, and learn more about a destination on Bing Travel.
• Friends Who Live Here: Bing will show you which of your Facebook friends live or have lived in the city you’re traveling to, so you know exactly who to go to for travel tips.
• Flight Deals: Bing will send you great deals on flights directly to your Facebook feed, for cities you’ve liked on Bing Travel.
• Shared Shopping Lists: You can build a shopping list and share, compare and discuss it with your friends on Facebook.

The Bing toolbar also now includes a “universal Like button,” which enables tagging of any site or page you visit to help create more social recommendations.

Google +1

Bing and Facebook’s joint announcement in October that Like data was coming to Bing SERPs put additional pressure on Google to accelerate its own social search efforts. Google introduced social search/”Social Circles” in 2009 but more recently introduced the potentially more significant +1 button in March.

Because Google has not been able to gain access to Facebook data it created its own version of the Like button, which it eventually hopes will rival Facebook’s across the web.

Last week Facebook struck back with a controversial anti-Google PR effort that many labeled a smear campaign. The exposure of that “whisper campaign” (about privacy and “Social Circles”) created lots of negative coverage for Facebook. That black eye will heal but the move illustrates how the stakes around social search have gotten much higher and the tactics rougher.

Related Entries

• Examining Facebook’s “Smear Campaign” Concerns About Google Social Circles
• Just Weeks Away, A Preview Of The Google +1 Button For Websites
• Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
• Bing, Now With Extra Facebook: See What Your Friends Like & People Search Results
• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’

Similar searches on Google Product Search don’t return appropriate results.

So far, the change will only apply to prices, and only to U.S.-based searches. However, it does work for mobile searches. Mobile searches for products are widely expected to grow, as shoppers in retail stores do price comparisons and look for reviews online.

Microsoft said it has built the engine so that it can be scaled to other natural language queries in time.

You can create the shopping list by checking a box next to each product you want to capture and share:

Products will then appear in the lower left corner of the screen and can be shared through Facebook. It’s helpful if you’re, say, trying to decide among two or three versions of the same item (e.g., iPod docks, digital cameras, sweaters).

Unfortunately I was having trouble adding products and getting it to work this morning. I assume it works on IE but it wasn’t really working on Firefox for me (probably a launch bug). The “add to shopping list” option doesn’t appear at all in Safari, Chrome or Opera however.

But before we get started let me first ask the naming gods to next year revisit and banish “Cyber Monday” from the tech lexicon — or dare I say “texicon.” And maybe we need yet a third day (or at least third phrase) after Black Friday and Cyber Monday to acknowledge the role that mobile shopping is starting to play in the whole process.

The big search engines

Of course all the search engines have shopping sites. Yahoo offers a wealth of resources including a holiday gift buying guide and Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals guide. As part of that you get all the “newspaper circular” ads being distributed this week that show Black Friday deals in stores. There’s also a dedicated Deals area on Yahoo Shopping.

Bing Shopping doesn’t have quite the same breadth as Yahoo or the Black Friday deals information but it has a helpful holiday gift guide for those looking for gift-buying inspiration. Bing is also a very good shopping engine.

Google Product Search/Shopping is the most “no frills” of the three. However, as of last week,  it can show you local stores that carry the desired item and whether it’s in stock — helpful for those who need it now or don’t want to buy it online.

In the female apparel category, Google now also offers the un-Googly Boutiques.com. It joins a growing list of “social shopping” sites targeting women, which include Kaboodle, StyleHive, Polyvore and quite a few others.

Ask and AOL offer shopping sites as well. Ask’s site is powered by parent IAC’s shopping engine Pronto, which offers a better experience than Ask itself.

I hadn’t been to AOL Shopping in a very long time and was pleasantly surprised to see all the content and resources there, including deals, hot lists and buying guides.

Amazon, eBay and the comparison sites

Amazon is far and away the king of online shopping. The company has two mobile shopping apps, including the useful new Price Check, for in-store product and price comparisons. Earlier this year Amazon announced that it would process a staggering $1 billion in mobile orders. EBay is the other US company that’s doing a huge mobile business. I’m not a fan of eBay but it has lots of holiday shopping resources, including daily deals.

I’ve already mentioned Pronto above. But the old, familiar comparison engines are there to offer price checks and reviews and deals (in some cases). Although useful most of the sites in this category are pretty tired and feature “generic” and largely undifferentiated experiences. That includes Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Nextag, Shopzilla and others.

Standouts in this category include TheFind (which has good mobile apps too). And of course Overstock.com is another very popular site. Become.com also has a special Black Friday section.

Looking for deals?

As mentioned Yahoo and eBay have deals areas that offer substantial discounts on products. However coupons and deals, it seems, are everywhere this year. The recession has caused this but Groupon‘s success is also partly responsible for spawning a cottage industry.

It was only a couple of years ago when online deals and coupons meant bait and switch. You were lured to sites only to discover that the promised deal wasn’t there. Now it’s almost impossible to list all the deal sites online. There are well over 100 daily deal sites now operating in the US.

In addition to those mentioned above, here are a few useful and noteworthy sites:

• The Dealmap (offers Black Friday deals offline, nearby)
• Retailmenot (deals at popular online retailers, includes Black Friday deals)
• LivingSocial (like Groupon but offers excellent travel deals)
• Savings.com (deals from major retailers)
• Yipit (aggregates daily deals form multiple sources)

Finding products locally

There are a growing number of sites that help consumers find products in local stores, offline. Google is making a big push into this area, as mentioned. And Goodzer just launched for New York this morning. And I just discovered another local product inventory site called LuckyLocal.com.

Milo wants to be the Google of local products, although Google is now trying to be the Google of local products. Milo allows users to search for and locate in-stock product inventory nearby. There’s also a Black Friday area on the site.

NearbyNow powers third party mobile apps that offer local product inventory. And so do Krillion and Retailigence. However, you can search and shop directly on Krillion where you cannot on the other two.

Along the same lines, these days ShopLocal is less a consumer destination than it used to be; it has become more of a marketing platform for retailers. However you can still access all the major retailer sales, products and Black Friday promotions on the site, as well as other types of coupons.

TheFind also offers a “shop nearby” feature that shows retailers that carry the desired product.

Shopping apps: while you’re in the store

The number of shopping apps for smartphones is proliferating like mushrooms in a field after a heavy rain. All of the major search engines and shopping comparison sites offer mobile apps for the iPhone, and Android in most cases. Bing does not currently have a specialized shopping app or tool. You can access Bing Shopping from a mobile browser however.

Most major retailers (e.g., Target, Gap) have mobile shopping apps that can be used to find stores, check products and see what’s on sale. As previously discussed, Amazon and eBay have mobile apps. Amazon’s new Price Check app is very user friendly and helpful for in-store review and price comparisons, which is the information (reviews, pricing) that most consumers are looking for from mobile shopping apps.

TGI Black Friday is a popular app for both the iPhone and Android, although the query “Black Friday” returns at least 20 apps on the iPhone.

Google Shopper (only for Android) is much more user-friendly than accessing Google Product Search through the mobile web. It also has local product inventory data, voice search and image and barcode scanning.

Speaking of which, there are more than a dozen stand-alone barcode scanning apps that can be used in stores (although retailers don’t like it). Two of the most popular are RedLaser and Scanbuy. The dirty secret of barcode scanning is that it often doesn’t work. That’s why it’s good to use an app that allows for multiple input methods, such as Price Check or Google Shopper or TheFind.

Finally, Foursquare, Shopkick, Gowalla, Yelp and several others reward users with deals and discounts for checking in at physical stores and local businesses. This isn’t Black Friday/Cyber Monday centric but there are retailers that are using these sites (especially ShopKick and Foursquare) for promotions.

This list unfortunately just scratches the surface of mobile shopping apps. But as John Lennon (or maybe Ringo Starr) once said, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers.”

More for Black Friday / Cyber Monday tips, also see here on Techmeme.

Happy Thanksgiving and may the shopping force be with you.

We know Microsoft officially dropped the Cashback as of July 30, 2010. Brian said dropping Cashback and going free on August 1st is Microsoft’s plan to compete closer to Google’s free product search.

Microsoft does have some advertising information on Bing Shopping over here and merchants can submit a form to be included. In addition, if you download the PDF from Microsoft, it does say:

There is no cost to participate in the Bing Shopping program. Upload your feeds and have your products listed in Bing Shopping results with no cost per click or cost per sale.

This advertising page has been revamped and is new compared to what I see in the Google cache. The previous page just said, “contact a sales rep” to learn how to be included.

Finally, it seems Microsoft has opened up a new forum for Bing Shopping. There is currently a single “welcome” post in the forum.

As an extension to adCenter search and Shopping listings, Bing Cashback held far-reaching promises of increased scale and brand enhancement for advertisers. It provided a unique lever of control for search marketers unlike any other demand generation vehicle, allowing advertisers to be more competitive in the Bing search landscape. And it complimented search well.

Unbeknownst to Bing advertisers, the Cashback program faced challenges at Microsoft. Notably, the Cashback business model was not profitable. According to sources at Microsoft, an advertiser would have had to spend up to four-fold of its pre-Cashback spend for Microsoft to simply retain its search revenue. While there may have been some exceptions during seasonal times, most advertisers fell far from the profitability mark.

Then factor in the huge business development funds pumped into the program in 2009 as well as hundreds of temporary support staff and it quickly becomes apparent just how costly Cashback proved to be. To justify these costs, the increased query share would need to be significant—and it wasn’t.

The program’s adoption also proved to be slow—particularly among larger advertisers—mostly due to its technical complexity. It was easier for smaller advertisers with setting up pixel-based reporting, yet the prospect of potentially limited gain in scale did not readily compel action. Nevertheless, the Cashback Specialist Sales team succeeded in acquiring thousands of advertisers. During this process, they strengthened Microsoft’s relationship with agencies and advertisers as they worked to guide all advertisers through the often arduous on-boarding process. They deserve to be recognized for their efforts.

More importantly, as Microsoft found in its program analysis, Bing Cashback did not play out to its expectations. Bing’s query share may have increased, but could not be directly attributed to Cashback. According to sources at Microsoft, Cashback had been effective at drawing a comparison shopping audience, however, not the loyal general-searcher base that it sought. Furthermore, rejection of the program by Yahoo in the upcoming Microsoft/Yahoo Search Alliance was also a blow. Either way, the program was deemed ineffective.

On June 4th, 2010, all Bing Cashback advertisers and customers were simultaneously informed that the program would be discontinued after July 30th. Unlike usual Microsoft practices, little information was provided. From an advertiser perspective, the announcement came as a shock, particularly for those businesses that invested extensive time and resources into the program. Why would Microsoft pull the plug on this so suddenly? Imagine if your business had just signed up for the program. For agencies, the abandonment strains hard-earned trust and will cast doubt on participating in future Microsoft “beta” programs. From a customer perspective, the initial announcement appeared overly negative and may arguably have kept customers from continuing to use Cashback until its end. Some retailers may have even seen decreased Bing revenue relative to their rebate incentives.

With two weeks remaining until Bing Cashback’s end, actively participating advertisers must know that any unspent funds in their reward pool will stay in Microsoft’s coffers. That doesn’t have to happen. Now is the time to use your reward pool savings to get as much out of the program as possible! By now, most Cashback advertisers should have a good idea of their rates of reward accrual and depletion by testing varying rates of Cashback rebate elasticity.

The key to depleting your piggybank quickly is simple—limit your accrual (the 75% of spend contributed to your reward pool) and maximize your depletion (depending upon rebate rate). Contrary to earlier practice of using Cashback to increase new customer acquisition off generic keyword-targeted campaigns, you will now need to remove your least efficient, highest spending campaigns from Cashback (revert to standard search) to reduce your accrual.

Next, determine an appropriately higher Cashback reward rate and apply this to your most efficient campaigns (i.e. branded). If you are unwilling to remove generic campaigns from Cashback (or looking to deplete your reward pool for Bing Cashback for Shopping), the alternative is to naturally increase your Cashback reward to a rate high enough to ensure account-wide depletion. The net outcome of these actions will allow advertisers to transition into August and leave as much of the reward pool paid out to loyal customers instead of Microsoft.

In retrospect, for the short time that we used Bing Cashback, it was an exciting and worth-while opportunity for early adopting advertisers and agencies alike. Given the arguably fewer innovative advertising products (i.e. Yahoo feed-based Submit programs, including Yahoo Search Submit Pro) at search marketer’s disposal, Microsoft’s abandonment of Cashback’s is certainly a disappointment. Nevertheless, hope remains that new tools and innovative features will emerge, especially as competition mounts between Google and a combined Microsoft and Yahoo search program. We may not have Bing Cashback, but perhaps Microsoft could grace its partners with the opportunity of something better?

Cashback launched on May 21, 2008 as an attempt to increase market share for their search engine, back then named Live.com. Over the years, Microsoft claimed Cashback was successful in gaining momentum for the search engine. They even used TV commercials highlighting Cashback to drive even more awareness for the program.

But, as Microsoft now admits, they “did not see the broad adoption that they had hoped for.” So they are discontinuing the program, the last time a searcher can use it is up until July 30th at 9:00 pm PST.