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Price Comparison Affiliate ProgramsHistory of price comparison services The internet boom of the late 1990s made the concept of price comparison both possible and profitable. In the subsequent 8 years, there have been at least 20 services launched in the UK alone. The recent trend has been towards mergers and acquisitions from larger, more general companies. Shopping comparison In the late 1990s, as more people gained access to the internet, a range of shopping portals 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. Some of the biggest UK websites based on this model included: www.worldofshopping.com - owned by Royal Mail and has since closed www.retail.co.uk - independent, but has since closed and the domain transferred to a different business www.shopsonthenet.com - independent and still running www.enterprisecity.co.uk - originally independent but was later bought by ShopGuide www.shopguide.co.uk - originally independent though later acquired by BarclayCard; acquired Enterprise City and relaunched to become www.shopsmart.co.uk Generic portals and search engines launched similar services, including Yahoo!, MSN, and Excite. Companies that stood to benefit from increased internet shopping (especially credit card and delivery firms) launched similar sites. All the following have since been closed, and some links do not work. www.worldofshopping.com - owned by Royal Mail www.btspree.co.uk - owned by BT Egg Shop - owned by Egg, themselves owned by Prudential Indigo Square - owned by BarclayCard; this closed after Barclays Bank bought ShopSmart in November 1999 This started to develop into actual comparison, with editorial comment and user reviews about individual retailers and products. Early price comparison services In 1995, pricewatch.com originated as the first price comparison search engine, focusing on computer hardware and software related products. In 1998 and 1999, various other 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. The biggest of these services included[citation needed]: www.shopsmart.co.uk www.shopgenie.co.uk www.checkaprice.co.uk www.pricechecker.co.uk Globally, similar websites were launched, and the period continued to see various websites launched, merged, acquired and closed. 2000 Kelkoo merged with Dondecomprar and ShopGenie. Later that year Kelkoo and Zoomit finalised their £100 million merger with ZoomIt. Kelkoo's investors owned about two thirds of the merged company CNet acquired MySimon for common stock worth approximately $700M ShopSmart relaunched under Barclays ownership 2002 Barclays announced that they were to close ShopSmart, with all traffic redirected to Kelkoo. 2003 Dealtime acquired Epinions 2004 Kelkoo acquired by Yahoo for €475m PriceRunner acquired by ValueClick for $29m plus shares Shopping.com floated on Nasdaq Stock Exchange 2005 eBay acquired Shopping.com for $620m E.W. Scripps acquired Shopzilla $525 million Experian acquires PriceGrabber for $485 million 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 fuzzy logic and human labour. An alternative approach is to crawl 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. Some combination of these two approaches is generally used. 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 (see below). 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 comparison shopping site. Depending on the particular business model of the comparison shopping site, retailers will either pay a flat fee to be included on the comparison shopping site or pay a fee each time a user clicks through to the retailer web site or pay every time a user completes a specfied action - for example, when they buy something or register with their e-mail address. or |
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