AquaCompare.com for Aqua Products

Aqua Compare is a shopbot dedicated for comparison-shopping for aqua products.

"Father and son team John and Peter Cunningham have launched a one of a kind website, www.AquaCompare.com, which provides aquarists with the opportunity to search and compare thousands of aquarium related products.

The Cunninghams' passion for aquariums began when, as a child, Peter won a goldfish from a local county fair. That small orange creature in a small glass bowl eventually led to tropical fish and marine aquariums. And a frustration with the lack of information and guidance for beginning aquarium hobbyists led to Aquarists Online, John and Peter's comprehensive website for aquarists. Noting the general nature of major comparison shopping websites, John and Peter then created Aqua Compare to address the needs of both aquarists and aquarium store owners.

While there is an abundance of information about aquarium setup and maintenance, those who want to become involved with this hobby may find themselves overwhelmed and confused. John and Peter have shared decades of knowledge and experience to aquarium enthusiasts via the Internet as well as two published books on the subject. They have now taken their desire to help beginners one step further with the creation of AquaCompare.

"A lot of online aquarium stores are all vying for top spot in the search engines and are attempting to draw through advertising and sponsorship," says Peter Cunningham. "Aqua Compare was designed so that everyone has a chance at getting in front of potential purchasers as well as being a site where aquarists can search, browse and find the best deals. Customers can leave feedback about the product as well as the store so that other consumers can read and learn from their experiences."

Anyone who is interested in getting started in the relaxing and enjoyable world of aquariums or even those that decided to dive in long ago will find a wealth of information at http://www.aquaristsonline.com and at http://www.aquacompare.com.
"

A shopbot for Singapore and Malaysia

ShopParadiso.com is a newly released shopbot featuring commodities in Singapore and Malaysia.

There are following features about this shopbot:

1. It only retrieve product price from sites that targeting Singapore and Malaysia shoppers.

2. It searches vendors' website instead of using data feeding because the latter don't cover 100% of vendor's inventory, according to Mr."Subaru" Barry.

Here is the description of ShopParadiso from its official statement:

"About ShopParadiso
ShopParadiso (shopparadiso.com), launched in August 2008, is the first and foremost comprehensive price comparison shopping search engine for Malaysia and Singapore region. It searches and lists thousands of products from scores of online merchants using proprietary search technology. With a team of Web search and consumer products experts, ShopParadiso is working to provide a world-class shopping search experience to the shoppers of Malaysia and Singapore. The products and services listed in ShopParadiso are sold only by their respective merchants and not by ShopParadiso."

A cool idea by Visuali.se: visualizing comparison data

Here is a newly launched (seems still in Beta test) comparison-shopping site (powered by Shopping.com) that could visualize the comparison information.

When you select a product category, all available products in this category will be displayed on the top of the page.




By clicking one of them, its information including price and technical details will be displayed in a new tab of the center page. You may select multiple products and each of them will be displayed in a new tab.



Once you want to compare them, you may click the "Click Here to View Important Product Features" and then a drop down menu appeared. You may select as many features to comparison as possible. Once you selected a feature, the information about them are displayed as bar graphs on the left or right side of the Page immediately.



When you decide the product to buy, you may click the "Buy it Here" tab and you will see all vendors that offering this product.

Though still kind of crude in design, this is a good multiple feature visual comparison shopping interface I've first see.

a comparison-shopping site created by a stay at home mom

We all know the entry barrier for comparison-shopping site is low but probably no one expects it could be created by a stay-at-home mom with no knowledge of coding and website design. Following is a news release about Shophilia.com from the Web:

Shophilia.com, a price comparison shopping website, launched on August 20, 2008. The price comparison website was created by a stay at home mom, with no prior knowledge of coding or design.

Since launching, just over one month ago, the site has been converted from html to php coding, to implement gzipping, which results in faster page loads. The site loads approximately 70% faster now, which is sure to please any shopper.

Computers with lower resolutions can shop with a better view due to new coding in place. "We are constantly working to improve the shopping experience by checking functionality from all angles. We rely on feedback from our customers," says Angela.

In the near future, the site will have new features for their "stores" tab. This section of the site contains over 4,700 stores, and soon you will be able to sort by name or number of products. It will have a first letter index with count of how many stores per first letter, and a search engine to search merchant, store by store name or keyword. "We are very excited about this feature, it will be a tremendous benefit to the consumer," says Angela.

Hurricane Ike caused outages across the web, including Shophilia.com. "Our partners are located in Texas and are still recovering. We just received an update today, and they're still without power. They said that the servers are as hot as an oven and that Centerpoint Energy is doing all that they can to restore power. I'm just thankful that they're alright," says Angela.

They have a "free shipping" tab, and can save you even more money by clicking on their "rebates, coupons and deals" tab. With the rising cost of fuel, what better time to take advantage of these features.

When you shop there, you're shopping with all of your favorite retailers, no more going from retailer to retailer or from comparison site to comparison site, now that it's all in one spot. Just in time for the Holiday season, http://www.shophilia.com, has over 5,500 stores and over 34 million products.

For additional information on the news that is the subject of this release contact Angela Meadows or visit www.shophilia.com.

About Angela Meadows:
Stay at home mom and founder of Shophilia.com

Contact:
Angela Meadows, Founder
www.Shophilia.com
1-712-432-0055 ext. 58790#

Pronto.com uses AppBeat DC

Pronto.com is a social comparison-shopping site. It allow shoppers to not only review a product but also create all kinds of product list based on their preference. This looks like an idea borrowed from Amazon. It also allow people to make friends with each other by making their product rating and list public.

In early September 8 news brief:

Crescendo Networks, Ltd., the recognized performance leader in accelerating and optimizing Web applications, today announced that Pronto.com is using AppBeat(TM) DC to ensure the performance, efficiency and availability of its Web applications for shoppers worldwide. Pronto.com is the Web's fastest growing comparison and social shopping site with more than 15 million monthly users, 70,000 Web retailers and 70 million products. It is an operating business of IAC, which owns more than 35 Internet businesses including Ask.com, Citysearch, Match.com and Evite.

So what is AppBeat DC? it is essentially a second generation load balancing solution. Using the golden rule of division of labor, it separate the application task with overhead processing. It also using the dedicated thread to process the aggregated same http requests, e.g. a keyword search on "iPod." Compared with previous load balancing solution, this one is more intelligent and could conduct global load balancing.

Anyway, it seems Pronto is experiencing fast growth and felt the needs to increase its system scalability.

Measuring the satisfaction of comparison-shoppers

Recently, Foresee Results, a consulting company founded by Professor Claes Fornell from University of Michigan, was engaged into the measurement of the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) for Shopping.com and eBay.com users.According to ForeSee Results, customer satisfaction could be used to reflect changes in company revenue, stock price, etc. It seems some statistics method like SEC (Structural Equational Modeling) is used to establish the relationship among them.

According to TC: "mySupermarket, which has been around since 2006, claims to be the first comparison service that allows users to compare a cart of multiple items across retailers—in its case, groceries, across British supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s Ocado & ASDA."

In addition, top online grocery sites are:

Alice.com: consumer oriented personal shopper, could help find best deals for groceries including coupon and free shipping deals.
Amazon.com: offer a wide range of groceries, subscription for regularly delivery is free
MySupermarket.co.uk: UK-based comparison shopping
Freshdirect.com: mainly for New York metro, food from local farms and dairies, organic.
Netgrocer.com: has been in this category for a long time, mainly for health and beauty, organic food, babyfood, delivers to APO/FPO (military) addresses
AllSuperStore.com: offer standard grocery store items
ShopFoodEx.com: bulk order, large inventory, seasonal specials
ExpatExpress.com: specializing on oversea delivery
GoBioFood.com: organic and high quality food
Safeway.com: cover many US areas because of its physical presence

Comparison-Shopping for Business Financial Service

Transparent Financial Services (TransFS), operator of the only comparison shopping website for business financial services.

"TransFS is an online comparison shopping business for small business financial services. Think of us as an Priceline or Travelocity, but rather than helping people compare and purchase airplane tickets, we help small businesses compare and purchase financial services (such as payroll processing, credit card processing and business loans)."

The Purchase of Ciao by Microsoft

Today, news released that Microsoft buys European comparison shopping site, Ciao, for $486M.

Based in Munich, Germany, Ciao operates consumer review and comparison shopping portals in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

In June, Greenfield made a definitive agreement to be acquired by Quadrangle for $426 million, and must now pay the consortium a $5 million fee to terminate that agreement.

Microsoft plans that the Ciao business will report to Rajat Taneja, general manager for worldwide commercial search at Microsoft.

There are several reason makes Microsoft in this move.

The major motivation was compete with Google and Yahoo on search market share. Earlier this year, Microsoft pucrhased Jellyfish.com for cashback service. The acquisition of Ciao and its established user base may allow Microsoft to extend that approach to Europe.

Yahoo has already acquired a French comparison shopping service, Kelkoo, which now operates in ten European countries, and also drives Yahoo's own-brand comparison shopping service in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. -- and Taiwan.

another meta-search shopbot

Another meta-search shopbot launched from Newark, DE today. ComparisonShop.com could simultaneously search the top ten shopbots with one search keyword. But it seems the site is merely a shell that it will lead you to the specific shopbot site without aggregating the data by itself.

As any college student knows, textbook has an inflated price if you buy from campus book store. For the same book, one can find a copy with a fraction of the price charged by campus store from the Web. Amazon third party sellers, eBay's half.com, all provide convenient search. But dedicated shopbot for books give one an edge in terms of aggregating all these prices from amazon, half.com and other online book stores. Specialized college textbook shopbots include campusbooks.com. Bookfinder.com provides a nice special page for searching textbook.

There are also shopbot for general book price comparison like addall.com.

College related websites like cheapscholar.org used comparison engine powered by campusbooks.com to help visitor find good price for textbooks: http://cheapscholar.org/2010/05/14/textbook-comparison-shopping-tool/

It seems like GetPrice.com.au is the most popular comparison-shopping website in Australia and New Zealand.

According to news report:

"MATTHEW Rigney has been appointed sales director at online comparison shopping site GetPrice.com.au. He cut his teeth on a range of projects at Fairfax Business Media and IDG magazines PC World and GamePro. GetPrice.com.au covers a variety of products categories including clothing and jewellery, computing, electronics, gifts and wine, health and beauty, home and garden, kids and toys, and sport and travel. The site has 750,000 unique visitors each month. Established in Sydney in 2005, Getprice is led by managing director Christopher Hitchen. It operates in Australia and New Zealand and under co-operative agreements in Germany and Israel."

Airline Tries to Nullify All Flights Booked Through 3rd Party Websites

Just read this from Techdirt:

"And people wonder why airlines have so much trouble staying in business? We were already confused enough by American Airlines' desire not to be listed on the sites where people search for airfare, and easyJet's plan to sue the sites that send it customers, but Irish-based airline Ryanair is taking this all to a new level. Beyond just being upset about those 3rd party sites (i.e., sites that send it business!), it's planning to cancel the flights for everyone who booked through one of those services (thanks to Sean for the link).

Yes, we understand that these airlines prefer people to purchase flights from the airlines directly, but it still seems bizarre to try to cut off a great promotional channel. People already know to go look at 3rd party sites for airfare, so actively working against having your flights promoted doesn't make much sense. Then actively pissing off a bunch of your customers who booked through those sites by canceling their flights is even more braindead, as you've just formed a huge group of customers who will complain about your airline and spread the word about how you canceled their legitimately purchased flight for no reason other than spite and a confusion over business models. When Ryanair started promoting how some of its seats might come with sexual gratification, I'd bet many passengers didn't realize it would end with them getting screwed."

It turned out this is true and the original report goes like this:

"TENS of thousands of intending Ryanair passengers could find their bookings cancelled over the coming days.

The airline yesterday said it would annul all bookings made through third party websites. In a move described as "totally unreasonable" by the Consumers' Association, Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary said the new policy would apply to anyone travelling after next Monday.

The hardline stance affects anyone who booked their Ryanair flights through websites like lastminute.com, v-tours, tui and Opodo.

About 1,000 people use these websites to book Ryanair flights every day, which means 20,000 passengers will be affected by the clampdown if bookings are made an average of 20 days in advance.

Ryanair will give refunds to all of the websites involved, Mr O'Leary said, but passing on those refunds to intending passengers would be a matter for the websites.

"We want to cause as much chaos for the [websites] as possible," he said.

"It is a totally unreasonable position to take," Consumers Association vice chairman Michael Kilcoyne said last night.

"The customer has made those bookings in good faith. If they have to now make new bookings at the last minute they could end up paying ten times as much.

"This is just Ryanair's way of extracting more money from customers, it seems the airline can do whatever they like and no-one can stop them."

A spokesman for Ryanair confirmed the airline had taken legal advice on the move, and was within its rights. Mr O'Leary also stressed that passengers were "getting stiffed" by these websites as their prices were invariably higher than those available on ryanair.com.

"The real issue here in our view is that Ryanair is concerned about losing out on the sale of other services such as travel insurance, hotels, car hire and to stop this they want to prevent consumers from using comparison websites," the Consumers Association countered in a statement.

Stance

The latest move represents Ryanair's fiercest stance yet in its desire to drive all its sales through Ryanair.com, and comes after years of legal battles between Ryanair and websites that incorporate the airline's booking engine into their own pages, in a process known as 'screen scraping'.

Outlining the airline's objection to screen-scraping earlier this week, Ryanair deputy chief executive Howard Millar said, "genuine passengers using Ryanair's website have been suffering long processing times and slower access because of the huge volume of information being downloaded from our website by these screenscrapers all over Europe".

"In all cases this scraping activity is unlawful and in breach of both Ryanair.com's copyright and terms of use," he added.

And it comes with a picture of the CEO of Ryanair, which explains quite a lot what happened to this company.

PriceSpider.com: A New Shopper Oriented Shopbot

The recently launched PriceSpider.com gives us a fresh perspective on the recent development of Comparison-Shopping Services.
Instead of using the data feeding and vendor registration, PriceSpider.com is crawling the Web to find best prices in real time.

According to the claim from its site, using innovative crawling technology, it searches hundreds of online retailers including Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, etc. One important feature of this shopbot is its social networking capabilities. Once you registered, you can create your shoppling list within the site and then share with your friends.


After a brief test of the site, I found it includes many popular features of existing shopbots. For example, it dynamically calculate the total cost of purchase once you provide your zip code. It also include price trends, reviews, vendor ratings as well as other product related information. These information are furnished in a user friendly way, e.g. the price trend for each product will pop up once you click a little image beside the product price. I have not test the social network shopping feature yet.

The most competitive feature of this new shopbot is its independence from vendor participation. The good thing is now vendors have outgrown the age of shopbot-blockade. To make it better, most popular shopbot nowadays demand money from vendor before they could appear in their price engine. Thus, the availability of pricespider.com with all its decent features makes it very competitive in the current comparison-shopping category.

So the most important question to wonder is the business model of pricespider. It is no doubt that pricespider will be able to get some commission once it refers a customer to a vendor, at least this is for Amazon. Meanwhile, currently the company is providing price related report to any interested individual or organizations. All of them are under the B2B category. They include competitive market analysis, visibility, price details, price activity, amazon.com and buy.com rank, MAP exception and rebate, etc. Hopefully these will generate enough revenue to sustain the growth of this new venture.

Finally, this shopbot is supported by Neudesic, a Microsoft National Systems Integrator and Gold Certified Partner. In other words, PriceSpider.com outsourced part of (or whole?) its technology support. This is a new phenomenon, which sounds like a pretty good living example of division of labor in this increasingly sophisticated ecommerce market.