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.
