On the internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and, a price comparison service (also known as shopping comparison or price engine) allows individuals to see different lists of prices for specific products. Most price comparison services do not sell products themselves, but source prices from retailers from whom users can buy. In the UK, these services made between £120m and £140m in revenue in 2005 [1], and is growing at an annual rate of 30% to 50%.
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History
Price comparison services were initially implemented as client-side add-ins to the Netscape and Internet explorer browsers, and required that additional software be downloaded and installed. After these initial efforts, comparison shopping migrated to the server so that the service would be accessible to anyone with a browser.
Services are now offered by websites dedicated to price comparison and by major portals such as Yahoo! Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video).
Shopping
In the late 1990s, as more people gained access to the internet, a range of shopping portals Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been were built that listed retailers for specific product genres. Retailers listed paid the website a fixed fee for appearing. These were little more than an online version of the Yellow Pages Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory of businesses, categorized according to the product or service provided. As the name suggests, such directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for non-commercial listings. The traditional term Yellow Pages is now also applied to online directories of businesses. As technology has improved, a newer "breed" of shopping Web portals is being created that are changing both the business model and the features and functionality offered. These sites do not "aggregate" data-feeds provided from the retailers, they search and retrieve the data directly from each retailer site. This allows for a much more comprehensive list of retailers and the ability to update the data in real-time.
Generic portals and search engines launched similar services and companies that stood to benefit from increased internet shopping (especially credit card and delivery firms) launched similar sites. Many of these services have since closed.
Services
Through 1998 and 1999, various firms developed technology that searched retailers websites for prices and stored them in a central database. Users could then search for a product, and see a list of retailers and prices for that product. Advertisers did not pay to be listed, but paid for every click on a price. Streetprices StreetPrices was founded in October 1997, making it the third price comparison service website, behind PriceWatch and ComputerESP/uVision (1996). StreetPrices was the first site to offer price graphs and price alerts (both released by December 1998), and was listed in the Consumer Reports Buying Guide every year in which they listed price, founded in 1997, has been a very early company in this space; it invented price graphs and email alerts in 1998.[2] These useful services let users see the high and low price of any product graphed over time, and request email alerts when a product's price drops to the price the user wants.[3] Other price search engines have also evolved to provide consumers sophisticated price-tracking tools, such as price drop alerts and price history tracking.[4].
Consolidations and acquisitions
- 1998
- Inktomi Inktomi Corporation was a California company that provided software for Internet service providers. It was founded in 1996 by UC Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The company was initially founded based on the real-world success of the search engine they developed at the university. After the bursting of the dot- acquired C2B Technologies for common stock worth about $160M[5].
- 2000
- Kelkoo The website Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999, allowing customers to find information on products they want to purchase, including price and seller information. . It was bought by Yahoo! in 2004. It operates in 10 countries, including UK, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and merged with Dondecomprar and ShopGenie. Later that year Kelkoo and Zoomit finalized their £100 million merger[6] with ZoomIt. Kelkoo's investors owned about two thirds of the merged company
- CNet acquired mySimon for common stock worth approximately $700M[7]
- ShopSmart relaunched under Barclays ownership[8]
- 2001
- UK Power Ltd launches the fifth Ofgem approved online gas and electricity price comparison service. Approved by Ofgem in November 2001.
- 2002
- Barclays announced that they were to close ShopSmart, with all traffic redirected to Kelkoo.[9]
- 2003
- Dealtime acquired Epinions Epinions.com is a general consumer review site that was established in 1999. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com in 2003, which in turn was acquired by Ebay in 2005. At Epinions, visitors can read reviews about a variety of items to help them decide on a purchase or they can join for free and begin writing reviews that may earn them money and[10]
- 2004
- Kelkoo The website Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999, allowing customers to find information on products they want to purchase, including price and seller information. . It was bought by Yahoo! in 2004. It operates in 10 countries, including UK, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and acquired by Yahoo for €475m [11]
- PriceRunner The website PriceRunner is a price comparison service launched in Sweden in 1999, and since bought by ValueClick. It allows users to compare prices on a range of products. The commercial headquarters are in London, England, and it also has offices in Stockholm, Munich, Paris and California acquired by ValueClick for $29m plus shares[12]
- 2005
- eBay acquired Shopping.com Shopping.com is a price comparison service owned by eBay and operating websites in USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia for $620m[13]
- E.W. Scripps acquired Shopzilla Shopzilla is a price comparison service. Founded in June 1996 by Farhad Mohit and Henri Asseily as Binary Compass Enterprises, the company changed its name to BizRate.com in January 1999. The company launched the website Shopzilla in November 2004, which then became the company name too $525m[14]
- Experian acquires PriceGrabber PriceGrabber.com is a price comparison service. They've partnered with more than 13,000 merchants, retailers, and sellers and provide free and unbiased information on millions of products in 25 different categories. The company also serves as the data source for numerous other shopping Web sites, including AOL Shopping, Bing, About.com, iVillage, for $485m[15]
- 2006
- In July, Idealo The company Idealo Internet GmbH is a price comparison service launched in Germany in 2000, and since bought by the Axel Springer AG publishing company. The headquarters are in Berlin, Germany. The Idealo website allows users to compare prices on a range of products from many shops was taken over by the majority from the media company Axel Springer which purchased 74.9% of Idealo Internet GmbH for an undisclosed sum.[16]
- In October, LAN Services, LLC bought SmarterDeals.com for an undisclosed sum. The website provides price comparison on computer hardware, software, and portable electronics.
- 2007
- MeziMedia (owner of Smarter.com) acquired by ValueClick ValueClick is a Westlake Village, CA-based online advertising company, which provides online advertising campaigns and programs for advertisers and advertising agency customers in the United States and internationally. It operates in four segments: Media, Affiliate Marketing, Comparison Shopping, and Technology for up to $352m [17]
- In June, private equity firm Providence Equity Partners Providence Equity Partners is a global private equity investment firm focused on media, entertainment, communications and information investments. The firm specializes in leveraged buyout transactions as well as growth capital investments and has invested in more than 100 companies globally since its inception in 1989 bought two-thirds of NexTag NexTag is a website for comparing online product prices. It started originally as a website where buyers and sellers could negotiate prices for Computers and Electronics products. The current business model with a focus on comparison shopping has existed since 2000. In June 2007, Providence Equity Partners purchased a two-thirds majority of the.[18]
- In August, the Hearst Corporation Hearst Corporation is a privately-held American-based media conglomerate based in the Hearst Tower in New York City, USA. Founded by William Randolph Hearst as an owner of newspapers, the company's holdings now include a wide variety of media. The Hearst family is involved in the ownership and management of the company bought Kaboodle This spelling of "Kaboodle" has come into popular usage in culture and commerce, often found in conjunction with the idiom "the whole kit and caboodle", which can be loosely interpreted to mean everything and more for about $30 million.[18]
- In October, Microsoft bought Jellyfish.com Jellyfish.com was a reverse auction online shopping site website. The Middleton, Wisconsin-based company was acquired by Microsoft in 2007. On May 22, 2008, Microsoft officially announced the cash back service as part of their Live Search group of tools. The site was shut down at Midnight, February 16, 2009 for $50m.[19]
- In October, News Digital Media, part of News Limited News Limited is an Australian newspaper publisher. Until the formation of News Corporation in 1979, it was the principal holding for the business interests of Rupert Murdoch. Since then, News Limited is now a wholly owned part of that company, the Australian business of News Corporation News Corporation , often abbreviated to News Corp., is the world's second-largest media conglomerate (behind The Walt Disney Company) as of 2008 and the world's third largest in entertainment as of 2009 . The company's Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder is Rupert Murdoch bought 27.5% of Australian comparison shopping site Getprice.com.au for an undisclosed sum.[20]
- 2008
- Greenfield Online (owner of Ciao) acquired by Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is a public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Established on April 4, 1975 to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8 for up to $486m [21]
- Affiliate Window Affiliate Window are an Internet Marketing company established in 2000 by Kevin Brown as one of the UK's first CPA affiliate networks. In 2008 Digital Window Ltd were listed in the 2008 Tech Track 100 League Table coming in at 18th which was a 17 place climb from 2007 when Digital Window Ltd came in at 35th. Digital Window Ltd received their best Released their CPA based shopping API system ShopWindow which is used by over 250 UK shopping related websites.[22]
- 2009
- PriceQuest.com acquired by private investors for up to $150m.
- 2010
- 2010-03-11: Yahoo Shopping USA closes down and becomes powered by Price Grabber PriceGrabber.com is a price comparison service. They've partnered with more than 13,000 merchants, retailers, and sellers and provide free and unbiased information on millions of products in 25 different categories. The company also serves as the data source for numerous other shopping Web sites, including AOL Shopping, Bing, About.com, iVillage, [23] [24]
Technology
One way price comparison sites can collect data is directly from merchants. Retailers who want to list their products on the website then supply their own lists of products and prices, and these are matched against the original database. This is done by a mixture of information extraction Information extraction is a type of information retrieval whose goal is to automatically extract structured information from unstructured machine-readable documents, generally human language texts by means of natural language processing (NLP), fuzzy logic Fuzzy logic is a form of multi-valued logic derived from fuzzy set theory to deal with reasoning that is approximate rather than precise. In contrast with "crisp logic", where binary sets have binary logic, fuzzy logic variables may have a truth value that ranges between 0 and 1 and is not constrained to the two truth values of classic and human labour.
A more common way for comparison sites to collect data is through a data feed file. Merchants provide information electronically in a set format. This data is then imported by the comparison website. Some third party businesses are providing consolidation of data feeds so that comparison sites do not have to import from many different merchants. Affiliate networks such as LinkShare and Commission Junction aggregate data feeds from many merchants and provide them to the price comparison sites. This enables price comparison sites to monetize the products contained in the feeds by earning commissions on click through traffic.
A third approach is to crawl A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, or Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters the web for prices. This means the comparison service scans retail web pages to retrieve the prices, instead of relying on the retailers to supply them. This method is also sometimes called 'scraping' information. Some, mostly smaller, independent sites solely use this method, to get prices directly from the websites that it is using for the comparison.
Yet another approach is to collect data is through crowd-sourcing Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community , through an open call techniques. This allow the price comparison engine to collect data from almost any source without the complexities of building a crawler or the logistics of setting up data feeds at the expense of lower coverage comprehensiveness. Sites that use this method would allow visitors to contribute pricing data. Unlike discussion forums which also collect visitor input, price comparison sites that utilize this method would collaborated the data with related inputs and add it to the main database though collaborative filtering, artificial intelligence, or human labor. Data contributors may be rewarded for the effort through prizes, cash or other social incentives. Wishabi Wishabi is a Canadian online shopping platfom that is owned and maintained by the Wishabi corporation. Wishabi's mission is "to give Canadians the best tools to make informed shopping decisions", a Canadian based price comparison site, is one example that employs this technique in addition to the others mentioned earlier.
However, some combination of these two approaches is most frequently used. Some search engines are starting to blend information from standard feeds with information from sites where product stock-keeping units (SKUs) A stock-keeping unit or SKU is a unique identifier for each distinct product and service that can be purchased. SKU use is rooted in data management, enabling the company to systematically track its inventory or product availability, such as in warehouses and retail outlets. They are often assigned and serialized at the merchant level. Each SKU is are unavailable.
Similar to search engine technology, price comparison sites are now spawning "comparison site optimisation" specialists, who attempt to increase prominence on the comparison sites by optimising titles, prices and content. However, this does not always have the same effect, due to the differing business models in price comparison.
Mobile
Mobile comparison shopping is a growing subset of comparison sites/applications. Due to the nuances of mobile application development, different product strategies have been pursued. SMS-based products allow users to find product prices using SMS-based interaction (example: TextBuyIt by Amazon), mobile web applications allow users to browse mobile optimized websites (Example: Google Product Search Mobile), and at the heavier end - native client applications installed on the device which offer features such as bar code scanning (Example: Barnes & Noble iphone app).
Business models
Price comparison sites typically do not charge users anything to use the site. Instead, they are monetized through payments from retailers who are listed on the site. Depending on the particular business model of the comparison shopping site, retailers will either pay a flat fee to be included on the site or pay a fee each time a user clicks through to the retailer web site or pay every time a user completes a specified action - for example, when they buy something or register with their e-mail address. Comparison shopping sites obtain large product data feeds covering many different retailers from affiliate networks such as LinkShare and Commission Junction. There are also companies that specialize in data feed consolidation for the purpose of price comparison and charge users for accessing this data. This has since been expanded the technology for business consumers in recruitment. When products from these feeds are displayed on their sites they earn money each time a visitor clicks through to the Merchant's site and buys something.[citation needed] Search results may be sorted by the amount of payment received from the merchants listed on the web site.[25]
See also
- Category:Price comparison services Categories: Electronic commerce | Domain specific search engines (lists articles about individual web sites)
- Comparison Shopping Agent
- Currency Exchange Website
- Botsourcing
- Vertical search A vertical search engine, as distinct from a general Web search engine, focuses on a specific segment of online content. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media type, or genre of content. Common examples include legal, medical, patent , travel, and automobile search engines. In contrast to general Web search engines, which
- Discovery shopping Discovery shopping is a type of online shopping that emphasizes the browsing aspects of the shopping experience. Discovery shopping search offers shoppers guided queries for more personalized results. The goal is to recreate the experience of live shopping as a leisure activity, where the items are selected by sampling or viewing a variety of
- Send Money Home SendMoneyHome is a money transfer comparison site that allows the consumer access to a range of alternative rates/products available for transferring money worldwide. As the world's first service of its kind, it provides impartial and comprehensive advice. SendMoneyHome offers its service to migrant workers, expatriates, overseas property owners,
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Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:28:39 GMT+00:00
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