The Rise of the Price Comparison Site
Watch any commercial TV station nowadays and in those five minute little gaps between segments of whatever mundane drivel you are trying to watch I bet my left foot you will now see an advert for a price comparison site. Moneysupermarket.com, gocompare.com, kelkoo.com and pricecomparison.com are but a few. They are legion and they are getting extremely annoying. Their adverts are on all the time.
We have the internet boom of the late 1990's to blame for the rise of the price comparison site as suddenly there was an entire market for people who didn't actually want to offer anything, they just wanted to tell people about what other people were offering and make money out of it. In the United States, the first two internet comparison shopping services were Jango and RoboShopper and were initially implemented as client-side add-ins to the Netscape and Internet explorer browsers. However, both required that additional software be downloaded and installed and after these initial efforts were met with resounding antipathy, 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 Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, Dealtime, and NexTag Major, portals like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN also offer comparison shopping services and in the UK some of the major comparison shopping services are DealClick and CompareStorePrices as well as the aforementioned U.S. websites which also provide UK services. They all compare prices of things as diverse as car insurance, van insurance, motorbike insurance, life insurance, you name it insurance; book prices, holiday deals, the price of gardening tools and so on and so forth, and what is more, they do so at the click of a button.
The way they do this is rather clever though, they get everybody else to do the work. A price comparison site is a hierarchical list, cheapest at the top, most expensive at the bottom, so retailers who want the public to know of their great offers supply their own lists of products and prices to the website in order to get more publicity/marketing opportunities. Other things called data feed files are employed: the retailers provide information electronically in a set format, this data is then imported by the comparison website. Cheekily enough, some third party businesses are jumping on this bandwagon, 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 collect 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.
So, from people simply wanting things there has sprung this new business which offers no new service other than a regurgitation of what was already out there. And now, a second stage of parasitic (or symbiotic if you want to be generous) business has emerged: positioning itself between the actual information and the comparison site, making it more readily available to the site so it is easier for them to regurgitate in the first place. In the long run, it probably makes life easier for us, but it just goes to show how many opportunities there are out there to make a quick buck.
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