So what is Price Comparison?

We simply put, price comparison websites, or price comparison services such as uk-compare offer users the ability to search for products and compare their prices. You will see a set of products and the available prices from a variety of retailers. A with most price comparison websites, uk-compare does not directly sell anything to the public, rather they simply collate information from a wide range of online sources and provide it in a neat little package for the web user to peruse.

Since the rise of the internet in the early days of the dot.com boom price comparision sites have been vying for customers in an attempt to become top dog. In the UK it is reported these services made in the region of £120m and £140m in revenue for the year of 2005, and this is expanding at an annual rate of 30% to 50%.

History of Comparison Shopping

The idea of price comparison is not a knew one, we are all very familiar here in the UK with the yellow pages. Ok it's not quite as complete a service, but it does offer people a route to locating a range of services. Price comparision websites work along similar lines, they simply point people towards what they are looking for at the best price available.

As the internet started to become more widely adopted by the public in the late 1990's the field was set for these new breed of website's helping users find whatever they desire, however they would have to wait, as these early services left a little to be desired. Infact they were really only just one step up from the yellow pages itself. There was no price comparison yet, merely an online directory pointing people to a range of shops in the genre they were looking. Useful yes, but not really making the most out of the potential they offered.

Examples of these early sites include worldofshopping.com, a website owned and operated by Royal Mail. This site has ceased operations. Another early pioneer was Egg Shop, owned by the online credit card company Egg. Interestingly many of these early services were owned and run by credit card companies and delivery firms, as they stood to benefit most from an increase in online shopping.

Price Comparison

Then in 1995 a website known as price watch become the fist actual price comparison search engine, focusing mainly on computer related products. Other website followed suit including, shopsmart.co.uk, shopgenie.co.uk, checkaprice.co.uk and pricechecker.co.uk.

Price Comparison Today

Nowadays there are many price comparison services on the web and the competition has never been fiercer. The main contenders are currently kelkoo (who made the headlines in 2004 after they were bought by Yahoo (the online shopping directory) for a cool €475m. Shopping.com (formerly known as Dealtime) who were bought in 2005 by eBay (the online auction giant) for an even cooler €620m. PriceGrabber, bought by Experian in 2005 for $485m. And finally other main player in this arena is Pricerunner, again purchased in 2004 by ValueClick, this time for a slightly less impressive $29m plus shares.

Technology

Having seen those figures I guess you would like to know how they do it? Well there are several methods but a couple which are most widely used. The first involves the retailers themselves providing the price comparison service with a list of all their products and the prices for them. These prices are then matched against the existing database using some fuzzy coding logic and a lot of human labour. Unfortunately there are currently no accepted standards for storing product data so providing an accurate price comparison between them is near impossible to automate. Books are easy, with each one having it's own ISBN. Products in general on the other hand don't have this luxury.

The other most widely used method is screen scraping. A simple process of writing a web application that will crawl across the internet looking for products. When it finds one it will upload it's details in it's database. This is the same kind of technology that has made search engines so useful, however product data is very difficult to categorise as it comes in so many different formats, with each website having it's own particular style and design.

The Future of Price Comparison

Well the future for price comparison looks set to become easier. The internet itself is starting to become more organised as unlikely as this sounds. But website designers are starting to apply stricter rules for the marking up of the code. Wider use of XHTML and XML technologies mean that it will become much easier for robots and people to accurately compare prices between online stores. As technology improves so will the price comparison services, and all this will be good for the consumer, driving down prices as competition gets hotter.

However there still isn't really a clear favourite website for price comparison, although it would take something very special to break through when there are so many established companies with big budgets to spend.

So where does uk-compare fit into all this? Well to be honest it doesn't. UK-compare is a site affiliated to Kelkoo and ValueClick. This means we get our products via the API they provide website designers in order to generate more traffic for their website and advertisers.

So what are you waiting for? Find the product you are looking for on uk-compare.co.uk today.