On the internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite . It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, 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
The internet boom of the late 1990s The "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1998–2001 (with a climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52) during which stock markets in Western nations saw their value increase rapidly from growth in the new Internet sector and related fields made price comparison profitable.
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), office productivity, video.
Shopping
In the late 1990s, as more people gained access to the internet, a range of shopping portals A web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, information, and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple[2] 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 The term 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. 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, was a very early company in this space; it invented price graphs and email alerts in 1998. [3] 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. [4] Other price search engines, such as Pricespider.com PriceSpider is an online price comparison service engine that allows consumers to search online retail websites for product pricing and related information such as descriptions, pictures, reviews, price history and inventory information and Dealalerter.com, have also evolved to provide consumers sophisticated price-tracking tools, such as price drop alerts and price history tracking.[5]
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[6].
- 2000
- Kelkoo The website Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999. It was bought by Yahoo! in 2004. It operates in 10 countries, including UK, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and Belgium. On 21 November 2008, Yahoo! sold Kelkoo to Jamplant, a private equity company merged with Dondecomprar and ShopGenie. Later that year Kelkoo and Zoomit finalized their £100 million merger[7] with ZoomIt. Kelkoo's investors owned about two thirds of the merged company
- CNet acquired mySimon for common stock worth approximately $700M[8]
- ShopSmart relaunched under Barclays ownership[9]
- 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.[10]
- 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[11]
- 2004
- Kelkoo The website Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999. It was bought by Yahoo! in 2004. It operates in 10 countries, including UK, France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and Belgium. On 21 November 2008, Yahoo! sold Kelkoo to Jamplant, a private equity company acquired by Yahoo for €475m [12]
- 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[13]
- 2005
- eBay acquired Shopping.com Shopping.com is a price comparison service. Shopping.com used to be called DealTime.com. It was founded in Israel in 1998 by Dr. Nahum Sharfman and Amir Ashkenazi, whose original idea was to create a downloadable client that would monitor changes in prices of products the user seeks to buy over time, notifying the user when the product price for $620m[14]
- 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[15]
- Experian acquires PriceGrabber PriceGrabber is a price comparison service. They've partnered with over 11,000 mechants and sellers. They also serve as the data source for numerous other shopping web sites, including AOL Shopping for $485m[16]
- 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. [17]
- 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 [18]
- In June, private equity firm Providence Equity Partners Providence Equity Partners is a private equity firm headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island that focuses on investments in media and telecommunications. Providence invests across different stages from growth capital and recapitalizations of family-owned businesses to large buyouts and take-privates. It is one of the largest private investment 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.[19]
- In August, the Hearst Corporation Hearst Communications, Inc. 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 for about $30 million.[20]
- 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, Feb 16, 2009 for $50m.[21]
- In October, News Digital Media News Digital Media is the digital division of News Limited, the Australian section of News Corporation. Its is one of Australia's largest and most innovative digital media networks, part of News Limited News Limited was the principal holding for the business interests of Rupert Murdoch until the formation of News Corporation in 1979. News Limited is now a subsidiary of that company, the Australian business of News Corporation News Corporation is one of the world's largest media conglomerates. 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.[22]
- 2008
- Greenfield Online (owner of Ciao) acquired by Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is a United States-based multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, its most profitable products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite for up to $486m [23]
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 In natural language processing, information extraction is a type of information retrieval whose goal is to automatically extract structured information, i.e. categorized and contextually and semantically well-defined data from a certain domain, from unstructured machine-readable documents. An example of information extraction is the extraction of, 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 binary sets having binary logic, also known as crisp logic, the fuzzy logic variables may have a membership value of not only 0 or 1. Just as in fuzzy set theory with fuzzy logic the set and human labour.
Another way comparison sites can 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 thru traffic.
An alternative approach is to crawl A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter 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.
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. Usage of the SKU system is rooted in data management, enabling the merchant to systematically track their inventory, such as in warehouses and retail outlets, and 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.
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.[24]
See also
- Category:Price comparison services Categories: Electronic commerce | Domain specific search engines (lists articles about individual web sites)
- Vertical search Vertical search, or domain-specific search, part of a larger sub-grouping known as "specialized" search, is a relatively new tier in the Internet search, industry consisting of search engines that focus on specific slices of content. The type of content in special focus may be based on topicality or information type. For example, an
References
- ^ Shopping Comparison Engines market worth £120m-£140m in 2005, says E-consultancy
- ^ "Price comparison portals listed and categorized". eCommerceOptimization. http://www.ecommerceoptimization.com/comparison-shopping-listing-guide/.
- ^ [1] archive.org The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the World Wide Web. With offices located in the Presidio in San Francisco, California, and data centers in San Francisco, Redwood City, and Mountain View, CA, the archive includes "
- ^ Best of the Bots: Shopping for Shopping Bots BotSpot.com
- ^ Web sites offer smart consumers valuable tools to save a bundle MSNBC.com Msnbc.com is the most-visited news website in the United States, owned and operated by NBC Universal and Microsoft as a joint venture. The main newsroom is on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, with additional newsrooms in New York City and London
- ^ Inktomi to buy C2B. CNET CNET Networks, Inc. was a media company based in San Francisco, California, United States. The company was co-founded in 1993 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie. It was acquired by CBS Corporation in 2008 and its properties were merged into CBS Interactive. CNET was also originally an acronym that originally stood for Computer Networks, but the"
- ^ Kelkoo merges with Zoomit
- ^ Why Pre-IPO Startups Consider Selling Out Forbes.com Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, Forbes magazine, is published bi-weekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published bi-weekly[clarification needed], and Business Week. The magazine is well-known for its lists, including its lists of the, 2000 2000 was a leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. 2000 was also the first century leap year since 1600-03-15 March 15 is the 74th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 291 days remaining until the end of the year. Retrieved 2006 2006 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar-11-07 November 7 is the 311th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 54 days remaining until the end of the year
- ^ Barclaycard relaunches ShopSmart shopping portal
- ^ Barclaycard to shut ShopSmart
- ^ Dealtime Signs Definitive Agreement To Acquire Epinions
- ^ Yahoo spends half a billion in Kelkoo swoop
- ^ ValueClick to acquire Pricerunner.com: Interactive Marketing Leader to Expand into Comparison Shopping
- ^ eBay to buy Shopping.com for $620 million
- ^ Antone Gonsalves, E.W. Scripps Nabs Shopzilla For $525 Million Informationweek.com, 2005 2005 was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar-06-07 June 7 is the 158th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 207 days remaining until the end of the year. Retrieved 2006 2006 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar-11-07 November 7 is the 311th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 54 days remaining until the end of the year
- ^ Sean Michael Kerner, PriceGrabber.com Grabbed by Experian . Internetnews.com. 2005 2005 was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar-12-14 December 14 is the 348th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 17 days remaining until the end of the year. Retrieved 2006 2006 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar-11-07 November 7 is the 311th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 54 days remaining until the end of the year
- ^ (German) Springer kauft Preissuchmaschine Idealo. Handelsblatt.com
- ^ ValueClick acquires shopping comparison firm. E-consultancy.com.
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ Microsoft buys Jellyfish.com comparative shopping site - washingtonpost.com
- ^ [4]
- ^ [5]
- ^ Mulrean, Jennifer. How shopping bots really work. Retrieved June 14, 2006.
- Haag, Cummings, McCubbrey, Pinsonneult, and Donovan. (2006). Information Management Systems, For The Information Age. “Buyer Agents”. McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
Categories: Electronic commerce Categories: Banking technology | Commerce | Information technology management | Domain specific search engines | Price comparison services Categories: Electronic commerce | Domain specific search engines
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(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular . price comparison service. is. ...
Q. its about internet service providers.. i want comparison of all prices for isps in india
Asked by paul raj - Thu Jul 13 01:45:49 2006 - - 1 Answers - 0 Comments
A. Sorry im not in India!!
Answered by Kristi A - Thu Jul 13 01:48:50 2006
