Shopping websites comparisons , sometimes called price comparison websites, Price Analysis tools, comparison comparison agents , shopbot or comparisons , is a vertical search engine that buyers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites incorporate product lists from many different retailers but do not directly sell the product itself, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements. In the United Kingdom, the service was made between Ã, Â £ 780m and Ã, Â £ 950m in revenue in 2005. Therefore, E-commerce accounts for 18.2 percent of total business turnover in the UK in 2012. Online sales has already reached 13% of the UK's total economy, and is expected to increase to 15% by 2017. There is a large contribution of comparative shopping websites in the current E-commerce industry expansion.
Video Comparison shopping website
History
The first widely known comparison shopping agent is BargainFinder, developed by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). The team, led by researcher Bruce Krulwich, created BargainFinder in 1995 as an experiment and published it online without prior warning to a comparable e-commerce site. The first commercial shopping agency, called Jango, was produced by Netbot, a Seattle startup company founded by University of Washington professors Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. Weld; Netbot was acquired by the Excite portal in late 1997. Junglee, a Bay-area startup, also pioneered comparison shopping technology and was soon acquired by Amazon.com. Other early comparison comparison agencies include pricewatch.com and killerapp.com. NexTag's other entry into comparison shopping named Times magazine's world's top 50 sites in 2008.
Around 2010, price comparison websites found their way into emerging markets. Especially Southeast Asia has been home to many new comparison sites. It started in 2010 with CompareXpress in Singapore, and in subsequent years companies like Baoxian (China), Jirnexu (Malaysia), and AskHanuman (Thailand) followed.
Meanwhile, in developed markets, Google is accused of promoting Froogle and its successor, Google Shopping paid only, surpassing competitors in its search results, lowering traffic to other sites and driving some of its business. The European Commission initiated an investigation in 2010, which ended in July 2017 with a EUR2.42 billion penalty against parent company Alphabet, and orders to change its practices in 90 days.
Maps Comparison shopping website
Comparison shopping agency
In the initial development stages from 1995 to 2000, comparison shopping agents included not only price comparison but also ratings and review services for vendors and online products. Overall, there are three broad categories of comparison shopping services.
Then, through mergers and acquisitions, many services are consolidated.
Services
Through 1998 and 1999, companies developed technologies that sought retailer sites for pricing and kept them in a central database. Users can then search for products, and view a list of retailers and prices for the product. Advertisers do not pay to be listed but are paid for each click on the price. Streetprices, founded in 1997, has been a very early company in this space; it created price charts and email notifications in 1998.
Technology
Price comparison sites can collect data directly from merchants. Retailers who want to list their products on websites then provide their own list of products and prices, and these are matched against the original database. This is done by a mixture of information extraction, fuzzy logic and human labor.
Comparison sites can also collect data via a data feed file. Merchants provide information electronically in the prescribed format. This data is then imported by comparison websites. Some third-party businesses provide data consolidation data so that comparison sites do not need to import from many different merchants. Affiliate networks collect data feeds from many merchants and give them to price comparison sites. Many popular shopping sites give affiliates directly to customers who want to become affiliate partners. They provide their own API to affiliate partners to show their products with specifications to affiliate partner websites. This allows price comparison sites to monetize the products contained in feeds by earning commissions on clicks through traffic. Other price comparison sites deal with merchants and aggregate feeds using their own technology.
In recent years, many off the shelf software solutions have been developed that allow website owners to retrieve inventory comparisons of website price data to place retailer prices (context ads) on their blogs or only site content the web. In return, the content website owner receives a fraction of the revenue earned by the price comparison website. This is often referred to as a revenue-sharing business model.
Another approach is to crawl the web for pricing. This means the comparison service scans the retail web page to take the price, instead of relying on the retailer to supply it. This method is also sometimes called 'memoing' information. Some, mostly smaller, independent sites only use this method, to get the price directly from the website used for comparison.
Yet another approach is to collect data through crowdsourcing. This allows price comparison engines to collect data from virtually any source without the hassle of building crawlers or logistics to prepare data feeds at the expense of lower coverage completeness. Sites that use this method depend on visitors who contributed price data. Unlike discussion forums, which also collect visitor feedback, a price comparison site using this method combines data with related entries and adds them to the primary database despite collaborative filtering, artificial intelligence, or human labor. Data contributors may be rewarded for efforts through prizes, cash, or other social incentives.
However, some combinations of these two approaches are most commonly used. Some search engines begin to blend information from standard feeds with information from sites where the product stock storage unit (SKU) is not available.
An empirical project that assesses the functionality and performance of a page-wise SSC machine (AKA bots) exists. These studies show that no best shopping bots or parsimonies exist with respect to price advantage.
Site comparison
Other competitors:
- Google Shopping
- bing.com
Business model
Price comparison sites do not usually charge to any users to use the site. Instead, they are monetized through payments from retailers registered on the site. Depending on the specific business model of comparison shopping sites, resellers pay a flat fee for inclusion on the site, paying a fee each time a user clicks through to a reseller website, or pays each time a user completes a particular action - for example, when they buy something or register with their e-mail address. Comparison shopping sites derive large product data feeds that include many different resellers from affiliate networks like LinkShare and Commission Junction. There are also companies that specialize in data feed consolidation for the purpose of price comparison and that users charge to access this data. When products from this feed are displayed on their site, they earn money every time a visitor clicks on a merchant site and buys something. Search results can be sorted by the amount of payment received from the merchant listed on the website. great price comparison sites.
In addition to comparing real items, some sites compare the prices of services, such as insurance, credit cards, phone bills, and money transfers.
Google Panda and price comparison
Like most websites, a price comparison site partially relies on search engines for visitors. The general nature of price-focused price comparison sites is because their content is provided by retail stores, content on price comparison sites may not be truly unique. The layout of a comparative website table style can be considered by Google as "Authentically Fixed Content and Roundup/Page Comparison Type". Starting the 2011 update for its search algorithm, known as Google Panda, Google seems to be starting to consider this comparison site to be of inferior quality.
Niche player, fake test site and fraud
Because large affiliate network providers provide accessible information on a large number of similar products from multiple vendors, in recent years small price comparison sites have been able to use technologies previously only available for large price comparison sites.
This technology includes software and plugins aimed at standardizing typical processes that involve price and product comparisons. Without many resources it becomes possible for amateurs to build seemingly professional websites, mostly using popular WordPress CMS. These small sites often rely on Google for their visitors, which are monetized using affiliate networks like Amazon.
The low content quality of a typical niche site, often bordering on spam and fraud, is a growing problem from the perspective of consumer protection and search engine quality. By playing Google's search engine giant algorithm, it is possible to place low quality sites prominently in search results.
To date, the phenomenon of counterfeit tests or comparison sites has escaped the public's attention. Analysis by testbericht.de found that 34.6% of German search traffic associated with product testing on the first page of Google leads to a fake test site. When a major German newspaper publishes a report on websites and consumer protection organizations such as sending warning letters, observers begin to notice panic in the industry, with site owners changing or removing the content at issue. Amazon, becoming the biggest player in the affiliate market, declined to comment on the matter.
Deceptive comparison sites give the impression of testing a product thoroughly. In fact, these tests are merely a collection of freely available information, often leading to the most expensive recommended product. This in turn increases the commission rate that site owners acquire for the recommended product.
Google Union Court Case
In 2017, the European Commission gave Google a penalty of EUR2.42BN for allegedly monopolizing the CSE market. Google released a statement that the European Commission's assessment will be appealed. Google will review the official decision, but expects that it will increase penalties in the second quarter of 2017.
See also
- Shop for Discovery
- The petrol price website
- Consumer switching
References
- Doorenbos, B; Etzioni, O; Weld, D. Scalable comparison sales agent for World-Wide Web , AGENT '97 Proceedings of the first international conference on CM New York, NY, USA 1997 autonomous agency
- Clark, D. Shopbots became an agent for business change , IEEE Computer, Vol. 33, Issue 2, 2000
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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