Cost-slashed nation

Tomorrow AOL will relaunch AOL Shopping, a comparison shopping site that emphasizes deals, bargains and coupons.

The site showcases monthly specials from retailers across a handful of categories, including cookware, appliances and electronics. Each month the deals change; and a new suite of advertisers are expected to pepper the mix, including Barnes & Noble, Sears, Dell, Sephora and Bank of America.

The site also features coupons from PriceGrabber.com, and a box on the homepage denoting the most popular clearance and coupon pages — part of a commitment to "[make] it easy to find things like coupons, specials and timely offers that are relevant to consumers," said director Sally Henry of AOL Shopping.

Marketers have also been given more options for promoting their wares. They can run campaigns that range from one-day promotions to year-long ad deals; and performance-based ads are also provided as an option.

December stats from comScore found online searches that included words like "coupons" rose 161% to 19.9 million. Meanwhile, searches with the word "discount" rose 26% to 7.9 million year-over-year.

A more recent research collabo between Platform-A and Information Resources reported 40% of shoppers are likely to use coupons accessed online — data supported by Inmar, which reports that coupon redemption in Q4 of 2008 grew 10% compared with the same period the year previous.

Traffic to AOL shopping was down 15% in February, to 5.3 million uniques, compared to 6.1 million in February 2008.