While consumers were still reeling from recession angst in the third quarter of last year, Drugstore.com Inc. managed to increase sales of beauty products during that three-month period without spending more on marketing per order. "We were able to maintain a steady cost per order while beauty products revenue grew 19% in the third quarter over the year-earlier quarter," says chief marketing officer Dave Lonczak.

What drove that performance at the company's e-commerce sites, Beauty.com and Drugstore.com? The growth included a bounce from an unusually poor September 2008 and some other initiatives, but there weren't any major new product launches or other uncommon events that could noticeably spike sales, Lonczak says.

Instead, he figures beauty product sales grew on both e-commerce sites mostly because of a broader and more effective array of online marketing channels, notably from two major search engine companies, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. Microsoft's Bing launched last spring with new shopping-related features, leading Google to respond.

The result is that both now offer search results pages that look and function more like shopping sites, offering retailers new selling alternatives to e-marketplaces and comparison shopping engines, many of which have seen declines in traffic in the past year as product searches on Google surged (see chart, page 42), according to comScore Inc.

"Comparison shopping engines have been left out in the cold a little," Lonczak says. "They're having a harder time attracting shoppers as Google and Bing make it easier for merchants and manufacturers to directly reach consumers. Google and Bing are doing a better job of that with product images instead of just text."

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