Generally, it can be divided into single category and comprehensive category. A single type of shopping mall is more common and popular, such as online bookstores, online CD shops and online flower shops. It is less risky, and the goods it sells are adapted to the characteristics of the network. A comprehensive type of shopping mall has a wide variety of sales.

In order to facilitate consumers to shop online, relevant online shopping software, namely shopping guide or shopping robot, has appeared. The shopping guide allows users to query and visit the shops selling products according to their own shopping needs, and return the query results, and then display the query results in a simple and unified format, which is convenient for users to compare the items they need to buy.

At present, most shopping guides are dedicated to buying books, music and movies, consumer electronics, and computer hardware and software.

Book guide is one of the most popular ones, and Bargainbot is a representative product. It searches by book title or author's surname, and can search 1 bookstores, including online bookstores such as Amazon.

BargainFinder of Anderson Consulting Company is commonly used for purchasing music guides. Through it, you can find music works in online music stores, and users can search after determining the names of musicians and music works.

purchasing computer products wizards, such as Pricewatch, can help to find many computer hardware products stores and summarize the query results. Each project contains a large amount of information, and there are many products to choose from, especially the price information contained in it is very useful because it is updated quickly. It also connects the name of the seller and the brand name, and the user can get the information about the product directly.