On the Internet, a person can see the price list of any particular product. Shopping Comparison Engine or Price Comparison Service or simply Price Engine provides this for you. Most of these engines do not sell products themselves. They source prices from the retailers from whom consumers buy th eir products. The concept of price comparison became achievable and advantageous in the late 1990s thanks to the growing Internet boom. As people’s curiosity and access to the Internet escalated, a range of shopping portals were built for listing retailers for specific types of products. Subsequently, 20 such services had been launched in the UK alone over the next 8 years. The whole thing is comparable to the online version of Yellow Pages. Worldofshopping.com owned by Royal Mail, btspree.co.uk owned by BT and the independent retail.co.uk are some of the former biggest shopping comparison engines. Shopsonthenet.com is still going strong and Shop Guide later bought the originally independent enterprisecity.co.uk. BarclayCard acquired Enterprise City and shopguide.co.uk and relaunched as shopsmart.co.uk.
Generic portals and search engines like MSN, Yahoo! And Excite launched similar services. Companies that were also benefiting from increased Internet shopping launched analogous sites. User comments and editorial reviews on individual retailers and products helped in the process. In 1998 and 1999, technologies developed by several firms facilitated the search for retailer websites. As they were stored in a central database, the consumers, while searching for a product, could see a list of retailers and prices for that product. Advertisers paid for every click on a price. Among the largest services, shopsmart.co.uk, checkaprice.co.uk and shopgenie.co.uk were prominent. Amongst other such websites across the world, mysimon.com, bizrate.com, shopzilla.com, price.com, priceask.com, dealtime.com, nextag.com, and pricegrabber.com in USA, DondeComprar in Spain, PriceRunner in Sweden, Ciao.com in Germany and Zoomlt in Norway , all deserve a mention. |
