Comparison shopping website

A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, comparison shopping agent, shopbot or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves. In the United Kingdom, these services made between £780m and £950m in revenue in 2005.

History

The first widely recognized comparison-shopping agent was BargainFinder developed by then Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and its SmartStore center in 1995 for an experiment. The first commercial shopping agent, 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 shopping agents included pricewatch.com and killerapp.com. Most of them were price comparison for computer related products and hence did not attract much public attention.