On the internet, 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 , and is growing at an annual rate of 30% to 50%.

Contents

• 1 History
  • 1.1 Shopping
  • 1.2 Services
  • 1.3 Consolidations and acquisitions
• 2 Technology
  • 2.1 Mobile
• 3 Business models
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 External links

History

The internet boom of the late 1990s 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!.

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• mySimon
  mysimon.com
  Comparison shopping site presenting product listings from stores, organized categorically.
• Become
  become.com
  Search engine with a large index of material related to shopping, such as buying guides, reviews, articles, specifications, forums, merchants.
• Google Product Search
  google.com
  Search engine which shows photographs of relevant products. Searches can be restricted by price, type of good, and retailer.