Which Site is Best?

The internet boom of the late 1990s made price comparison profitable.

In the United States, the first two internet comparison shopping services were Jango and RoboShopper. These services were initially implemented as client-side add-ins to the Netscape and Internet explorer browsers, and both 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.

Currently some of the major U.S. Based comparison shopping services are Become, mySimon, BizRate, Dealtime, and NexTag.^{[citation needed]} Major portals like Yahoo! and MSN also offer comparison shopping services. In the UK some of the major comparison shopping services are DealClick and CompareStorePrices as well as the afor mentioned U.S. websites which also provide UK services. The financial comparison sector has seen significant growth in the Uk with a large number of new sites emerging over recent years. Such sites include Money Expert and UK Financial Options[4].

The original Roboshopper.com site still exists and has been re-targeted as a "Meta" tool which gives results from the leading comparison shopping sites, as well as product review and rating sites.

Shopping comparison

In the late 1990s, as more people gained access to the internet, a range of shopping portals[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. 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, including Yahoo!, MSN, and Excite. Companies that stood to benefit from increased internet shopping (especially credit card and delivery firms) launched similar sites including Royal Mail, BT, Egg, and Barclays Bank. Many of these services have since closed.

As well as price comparison sites like www.pricesbolo.com which offer a very broad range of products for price comparison there are some that compare individual products. The providers of these services often claim to produce better results than the major comparison engines as they are concentrating on individual marketplaces.

Early price comparison 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. Globally, similar websites were launched, and the period continued to see various websites launched, merged, acquired and closed.

Consolidations and acquisitions

1998

• mySimon launched as the most comprehensive comparison shopping service with over 1,000 online merchants

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
• mySimon founders started Become that for the first time in the industry combines price comparison and web search for product reviews in one place.

2005

• eBay acquired Shopping.com for $620m
• E.W. Scripps acquired Shopzilla $525m
• Experian acquires PriceGrabber for $485m

2006

• In July, Idealo was taken over by the majority from the media company Axel Springer which purchased 74.9% of Idealo Internet GmbH for an undisclosed sum.
  

2007

• MeziMedia (owner of Smarter.com) acquired by ValueClick for up to $352m 
• In June, private equity firm Providence Equity Partners bought two-thirds of NexTag.
• In August, the Hearst Corporation bought Kaboodle.^[17]
• In October, Microsoft bought Jellyfish.com for $50m.^[18