You need to purchase an item, say a case of Plastic Bags.  You go to Google and enter “plastic bags”.  Up comes Uline, ranked number one and in the shopping images at the top it’s Uline, Uline and more Uline images.  On the image line, Uline comes up in 14 spots out of the first 15.  The billion dollar company has cornered the market on the Google search “plastic bags”.  At the time of this writing, Fetpak came up on the second page of “plastic bags” 

The naive shopper simply clicks Uline and doesn’t bother to do real shopping.  They end up overpaying for the plastic bags they wanted, plus shipping and handling charges too.  This shopping method is equal to walking into an electronics store to purchase a TV and buying the first TV, the one they have setup at the front door.  The one that the store most probably makes a very large profit on.  

The experienced shopper will first never enter a generic term such as “plastic bags”.  Instead they will search with a long tailed keyword such as “clear produce bags on rolls“, where Fetpak is seen at the top on Google, or “small die cut merchandise bags” where a Fetpak image comes up at the top as of this writing. 

A rule of thumb is to never click the company that shows up in multiple areas at the top of the page.  You will end up paying for their huge advertising budget and most people aren’t fond of doing that.  

It also pays to search on Bing as they tend not to permit the same dominance to companies as Google does.  So you avoid having to look at a company 14 times in the first 15 images.  Bing seems to have a more level playing field, which creates more competition which saves you money.

Search with long tailed keywords and avoid companies that attempt to monopolize the top area.  Also try Bing searches instead of Google.  These tips will save you a huge amount of money over the long term.