Update: for the latest revision of this list go to Popular price comparison sites - July 2008.
This is April 2007 revision of the Popular Price Comparison web sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to March results. The list has a total of 34 web sites. There are 14 more in my database that didn’t meet the Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
On average the rating declined by 7.27% which is an improvement over the last month’s 15.88%. mytriggers.com dropped out of the list this month (I guess the idea of subscribing to price changes never took off), and I added two new participants: calibex.com and bestwebbuys.com.
The winner in April is again sortprice.com with a gain of 25.79%. It sounds like this was anticipated since I got a comment from them just today inquiring on the next update. If I hadn’t added calibex.com, sortprice.com would have jumped from #21 to #20 as they outpaced thefind.com.
The worst performer is like.com with a Alexa loss of 23.83% (beating pricewatch.com by just a notch). The decrease comes as a part of a long slide (pictured below) the website is experiencing ever since they debuted their “colorful” service late last year. Surprisingly though their Google rank increased this update.
Another interesting development is pricegrabber.com (and bottomdollar.com who are a part of pricegrabber.com) gaining Google rank of 9 which is more than anyone else in the list.
Overall Price Comparison sites fared much better than Deal Sites who I reviewed just last week. Enjoy the complete list below!
| # | Web Site | Alexa Rank | Page Rank | Online Since | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | shopping.yahoo.com | 1(*) | 8 | 18-Jan-1995 | ||
| 2 | shopping.msn.com | 2(*) | 8 | 10-Nov-1994 | ||
| 3 | froogle.google.com | 3(*) | 8 | 11-Sep-2001 | ||
| 4 | shopping.aol.com | 55(*) | (-3.77%) | 8 | 22-Jun-1995 | |
| 5 | shopper.cnet.com | 138(*) | (-10.4%) | 7 | (-1) | 05-Jul-1996 |
| 6 | shopping.com | 449 | (-3.46%) | 8 | 03-Jul-1997 | |
| 7 | nextag.com | 568 | (-10.94%) | 7 | 15-Oct-1998 | |
| 8 | bizrate.com | 731 | (-6.25%) | 8 | 24-Apr-1996 | |
| 9 | pricegrabber.com | 775 | (-10.71%) | 9 | (1) | 10-Mar-1999 |
| 10 | dealtime.com | 850 | (-2.41%) | 8 | 07-Oct-1998 | |
| 11 | shoplocal.com | 1368 | (-12.22%) | 8 | 24-Sep-1998 | |
| 12 | epinions.com | 1565 | (-14.15%) | 8 | 12-Feb-1999 | |
| 13 | shopzilla.com | 1725 | (-12.38%) | 7 | 04-Jul-2002 | |
| 14 | smarter.com | 2649 | (-8.39%) | 7 | (1) | 28-Apr-1998 |
| 15 | pricerunner.com | 4877 | (-13.34%) | 7 | 19-May-1999 | |
| 16 | mysimon.com | 5738 | (-8.8%) | 8 | (-1) | 15-Apr-1998 |
| 17 | calibex.com | 5933 | (n/a) | 5 | (n/a) | 02-Oct-2000 |
| 18 | pricewatch.com | 8753 | (-23.28%) | 6 | (-1) | 26-Sep-1995 |
| 19 | become.com | 10864 | (-18.82%) | 7 | (1) | 20-Jan-2004 |
| 20 | ebates.com | 12887 | (-18.44%) | 6 | 29-Dec-1998 | |
| 21 | sortprice.com | 13809 | (25.79%) | 7 | (1) | 15-Jan-2004 |
| 22 | thefind.com | 16761 | (7.9%) | 6 | (1) | 19-Oct-2006 |
| 23 | mpire.com | 18798 | (0.02%) | 5 | (-1) | 01-Jun-2006 |
| 24 | bestwebbuys.com | 19551 | (n/a) | 8 | (n/a) | 06-Jan-1998 |
| 25 | pronto.com | 23340 | (16.2%) | 8 | 01-Jan-2006 | |
| 26 | like.com | 23505 | (-23.83%) | 6 | (2) | 22-Feb-1995 |
| 27 | pricescan.com | 27494 | (-11.99%) | 6 | 03-Sep-1997 | |
| 28 | activeshopper.com | 27737 | (1.3%) | 5 | 12-Jan-1999 | |
| 29 | jellyfish.com | 29028 | (-14.35%) | 5 | 26-Jun-2006 | |
| 30 | shopwiki.com | 54455 | (-19.59%) | 5 | 15-Dec-2004 | |
| 31 | retrevo.com | 63711 | (-20.92%) | 6 | (1) | 10-May-2006 |
| 32 | hawkee.com | 78354(**) | (-16.68%) | 6 | 02-Jan-1997 | |
| 33 | streetprices.com | 85083 | (-3.89%) | 5 | 16-Oct-1997 | |
| 34 | bottomdollar.com | 97926 | (-9.53%) | 9 | (1) | 04-Jul-1997 |
(*) Note: traffic stats for these sites is an aggregate of all traffic to the top domain (e.g. Yahoo.com or Google.com) and thus cannot be used to judge how popular this particular price comparison service is.
(**) Note: the web site is a portal with price comparison engine being one of the offered web services. Alexa rank cannot be used to judge how popular this price comparison engine is.
Useful list, thanks for putting it together!
Alexa bites! These numbers are SO FAR from reality… This can be demonstrated in a variety of ways:
1. talk to any of the listed companies. You’ll find that their trend lines don’t come anywhere near matching what Alexa shows. I’ve seen sites who’ve had usage DOUBLE while Alexa shows a decrease.
2. compare it to a real service like NetRatings. Again, Alexa is SO FAR off that it is worse than useless.
3. Alexa measures traffic. It does NOT measure the # of leads (or even clicks out) that a site generates. This is the true measure of the strength or weakness of a comparo site. Anyone can buy traffic in. It is the traffic OUT that counts
And so on…
I run a price comparison site. It’s almost a year old. It’s not the conventional price comparison site - there are over 200 merchants - many are brick and mortar stores, most are online only offers that you can’t find in the stores. Many of the price comparison sites in your list I’ve never heard off. Just as though, the one I run, is a smaller site, but with just as many offers, coupons, and merchants as the most well known.
The discussion for this blog post is closed. To leave your comments please go to the latest revision of the list.