Webware100

Yahoo Shopping is Yahoo's e-commerce site. It lets you search for items listed online and highlights some of the good deals from around the Web. In addition to its own search tool, it employs deals from various online partners including Woot.com for a special version of Woot aimed specifically at Yahoo shoppers.

While Google's shopping tool focuses mainly on search, Yahoo Shopping takes more of a directory approach. You can browse products from all over the Web in a giant catalog. It also keeps track of some of the most popular deals from its members, forming a hot list that might help shoppers find potential deals. Despite its directory like approach, Yahoo Shopping's strength relies around its price comparison engine, which it gained in 2004 with the acquisition of European start-up Kelkoo.

Winner: Yahoo Shopping (Shopping.Yahoo.com)
Category: Commerce

Woot is an online retailer of goods. Most of the items sold are electronics, although you never know what will be next. The site sells a new product every night at midnight Central time and will keep it available until the next night or until it sells out. Unsold goods are then later sold (usually at a discount) in what's called a Woot-off, where the retailer continues to sell new or previously listed goods until they run out of stock, replacing it with other items. Woot offs are well known for ending with the notorious "bag of crap" which contains a random grouping of items that are undisclosed to the buyer until it arrives in the mail. Bags of crap have been known to randomly contain high value items such as big-screen TVs and popular electronics.

Besides its standard store, Woot has three other variants that use the same, or a similar sales model. Wine.woot.com sells a new selection of wine or alcoholic items each week, while Shirt.woot.com sells a new user-created T-shirt every day. Woot's other site Sellout.woot.com is a partnership with Yahoo's Shopping site, and usually sells the second string items from Woot.com.

Winner: Woot (Woot.com)
Category: Commerce

PayPal was one of the first services to let people exchange money online. It was popularized--and later purchased--by eBay, PayPal is one of the most widely recognized payment systems on the Internet. It's used in online auctions and stores as a way to control and manage payments.

PayPal has survived throughout the years by charging fees to its sellers. Buyers in online auctions and those making donations via the service aren't charged these fees.

One of the reasons people choose to use PayPal over other services is its buyer protection and anonymization services, which offer some protection against online fraud. More recently, alternate services such as Google's Checkout have garnered some of the attention in this space for similar efforts with lower fees.

Winner: PayPal (PayPal.com)
Category: Commerce

Kayak is like Google for travel sites. Its search engine scours the Web to help you find the cheapest deals on travel services around the world. It searches more than 140 travel sites and lets you sort and customize the data. You don't actually purchase the tickets or hotel bookings through Kayak, it simply directs you to the purchase page.

Some of its most useful features are the Buzz and Fare Alert planning pages. Buzz shows you the cheapest deals as discovered by other Kayak users in their searches. These prices are aggregated from historical data and listed when you do a search from your city. The Fare Alert service will send you an e-mail when a trip from one city to another becomes available at a low price, letting you pick when you're going to travel by the cheapest price.

Winner: Kayak (Kayak.com)
Category: Commerce

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Google's ad services let anyone put advertisements on their Web site. They can be anything from generic banners all the way to contextual ads that show offers related to content on the site. In addition to site ads, site owners can also purchase AdWords, which are purchased keywords in search terms. When a user buys one of these words, a link to their site will show up in the sponsored area to the right of a Google search using that word.

One of the reasons Google's ads have become so successful is that they can easily be integrated into many sites and blogging services with very little knowledge of coding or advertising. Google has also integrated the ad statistics into their analytics tool, to let people keep track of who is clicking them.

Winner: Google AdWords (Adwords.Google.com)
Category: Commerce

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods. Users can create their own virtual shop fronts to sell almost anything they'd want. Etsy has an integrated search tool that lets anyone search the site for goods and services out of a centralized directory. Users can also get into the nitty-gritty and design the specific look and feel of their own shops.

The site is a wonderful place to find the kind of crafts or goods you'd find at a local market--items that are often overlooked or simply diluted in the avalanche of consumer products that make their way onto other classified and auction sites such as eBay. It's also a great place for people to sell their stuff without having to buy a special domain, write code, or hire someone to build a Web site, and pay for the hosting.

Winner: Etsy (Etsy.com)
Category: Commerce

eBay is an online auction marketplace. It was one of the first auction Web sites on the Internet, and it has become hugely popular as a way to buy and sell goods on the Web. PayPal requires user registration for buyers and sellers, and it has instituted a user-credibility system with both karma points and a buyer and seller review to let users police themselves. The more frequent and well-respected users get certain advantages over new users, and commercial sellers are able to get discounts on listings and payment options.

eBay makes its money by charging its sellers a listing fee, as well as fees for several premium listing enhancements. The service is well known for its sometimes controversial listings, including rare commercial goods that often fetch astronomical prices, especially during the holiday season. The service is tightly tied with PayPal, which is owned by eBay, as a way to pay for goods and services, charging the buyer a percentage of the sale price or a one-time fee for each listing.

Winner: eBay (eBay.com)
Category: Commerce

Craigslist is a free, online classifieds service that's localized by geography. Do you need to sell that old refrigerator this weekend? Put it on Craigslist. Users can post items they want to sell and get responses by telephone or e-mail from people who live around them. It cuts out the middleman and often results in quicker sales than you'd get with other services such as eBay or your local newspaper.

In addition to a free-for-all buyers-and-sellers market, there's also a job board that's populated by many employers who agree to pay the $75 per category to list their openings. There are also house and apartment listings, personal ads, and an active user forum where people can talk about whatever they want.

Winner: Craigslist (Craigslist.org)
Category: Commerce

Amazon.com was one of the first online retailers in the world. It started out with books and now sells nearly every consumer good, including groceries and over-the-counter medicines. The service is well known as one of the best places to find new or used books at prices below what you'd pay in most retail stores. It also features free shipping on many of its items.

One of the things that makes Amazon.com dynamic as an online retailer is its community of users, who write reviews and rate nearly every product on the service. Amazon.com is also transparent about which products are selling well in each category, which provides a secondary means for consumers to find out what's hot.

Winner: Amazon (Amazon.com)
Category: Commerce