ProBargainHunter.com

I have briefly touched the subject of comparison shopping in my earlier post when I listed the popular price comparison sites. Now I will try to summarise what I know about how comparison engines work, what business model they use, and will review a few new web sites that don’t follow the traditional approach.

Sprenzy was launched in August this year by Chuck Lai and Peter Koonts. Before starting Sprenzy Chuck was in charge of product development at MySimon (a division of CNet) and is well familiar with Shopping.com API which Sprenzy utilizes. In a way Sprenzy is similar to the traditional comparison engines because it uses the legacy revenue model: Pay Per Click. What does it mean?

To get to the Shopping.com’s (and therefore Sprenzy’s) database the merchant needs to sign an agreement which requires them to pay each time a user clicks at the link to their product (very similar to Google AdWords). Sprenzy then gets a slice of that money. What happens if a merchant doesn’t sign the agreement? You guessed it right! Their products are not listed. This basically excludes any low margin and wholesale resellers – those who are more likely to sell at lower price.

So why am I even reviewing them? Sprenzy has taken a very innovative approach as far as the user interface is concerned. They actively use AJAX and javascript to improve your shopping experience. In addition they built in Epinions product reviews conveniently available as you shop. The feature I like the most is ability to add items to My List for side-to-side comparison.

If you are a bargain hunter freak deep to the bone (like myself) then you will like Mpire. Mpire has differentiated itself from the rest by bringing together listings of new and used items from eBay, uBid, Yahoo! Auctions, Overstock, and a number of regular online stores and by adding analytics on top of it to help you figure out what you should be paying for the item. You can see the average price, a historical price range, and a 30 day price trend – they call it Mpire Price Check. This should give you plenty of information to spend a night shopping. I have had a very nice impression from the web site overall. Those thumbnail pictures getting bigger in size as you hover the mouse look very cool.

Some of the neat tools worth looking at are the eBay search tag cloud and pricing guidelines for some of the products. Additional functionality opens up when you sign up for a free account. You will be able to save your searches, create watch lists and set up price alerts.

Jellyfish made a lot of buzz when it launched back in June this year. Unlike traditional merchants advertising through the Pay Per Click system, merchants pay Jellyfish a referral fee, at least 50% of which is passed onto the consumer as a cash back. This is very similar to what eBates and FatWallet have been doing for quite a while except that Jellyfish have added some neat search features (ability to refine the results by price range, store or manufacturer) and added AJAX to improve the overall user experience. As I was browsing the web site the one thing I was really missing was those product reviews I could read at Sprenzy.

I really don’t see what is so revolutionary about paying cash back to the user that Jellyfish is doing. Especially since this comes at the price of reducing the list of available items (only affiliated merchants list their products in the database). One thing they have done right compared to Ebates is they don’t require you to sign up to make the purchase. Lame – Ebates!

SortPrice while somewhat less user friendly yet is a very nice and simple to use comparison shopping engine. You can search by keyword or by category. You can drag and drop your selections to a list for comparison.
Lack of detailed item descriptions is a real drawback. User reviews for the product and the store would not hurt either. I understand the limitations come from the completely different revenue model that the company employs.

Sortprice lists a small subset of the merchant products for free and then, as opposed to charging on a click basis, they have an Enhanced Listing Program where merchants pay a flat monthly rate to get the rest of their items in. Taking into account recent click fraud developments this can be a very attractive alternative for the merchants. As for us bargain hunters… the model still punishes unaffiliated merchants and hence reduces the number of offerings.

ShopWiki launched earlier this year and TheFind launched in beta just yesterday could be the ultimate solution to the problem of excluding products from the search… that is if it works. These web sites don’t charge merchants for inclusion of their products and instead crawl the web as opposed to working through merchants’ API and feeds.

This on one side increases the number of offered items but on the other side it noticeably lowers the quality of presented information. Product categories, reviews and feature comparison are non-existent among these web sites. I would rather consider them “smart” or “enhanced” search engines than comparison shopping tools.

How do they make money? They monetize the service very similar to the way regular search engines do it – by offering promoted or sponsored search results and by listing featured stores on the search results page.

Since we are down to the search engine level let me mention these two web sites as well: Retreve and Givemebackmygoogle. Both are aiming at improving the results returned by plain vanilla search engines when you are looking for consumer products. The last one is especially remarkable due to its simplicity. It is more like a hack than a web site. I could probably build one like it overnight. Maybe I should? ;-)