Price Comparison – A Valuable, Time Saving Tool – For Consumers and for Business Owners

Do you remember fondly the age of pre-internet shopping? A day of a great deal of walking trying to locate the best product at the right price and in places you often turn out back in the shop you began, but with sore feet! Shopping was characterised by:

  •  Your local shopping centres didn’t have what you wanted (until you lived inside a major city)
  •  You did not know who would stock everything you were looking for before venturing out
  •  Whenever you have found a stockist you couldn’t know if you were getting the best price

As an outcome there were rather less competition on cost and the retailers were in a much stronger position than the consumer.

Roll to the internet age as well as the whole situation has turned around and also the customer is now in the much stronger position with entry to a mass of information. Some would argue possibly excessive information.

There is totally no need to leave the comforts in your home and queue in congested zones, pay extortionate parking fees. Everything is available online and sent to your door.

Even if you still enjoy a visit to the businesses you can now do your research beforehand to successfully know which products might be located and what to anticipate to pay.

However, the hardship actually is searching from the jungle of knowledge for the details which might be relevant. This is exactly where price comparison tools add value and also why there has become a large collection of such tools covering all kinds of retail sectors from gas and electricity to smart phones and even holidays.

How do these price comparison tools function?

Price comparison normally gathers information in a number of various ways but the two most typical methods are:

Price Comparison Data Service At iHarvest.co.uk

Why use Price Comparison Data Extraction Services ?

  • Visualise  your competitors “in stock” items multiplied by the price to get a stock evaluation.
  • Get a complete list of all brands sold.
  • Get a complete list of sections and sub sections of products.
  • Analyse brand size proportions in a competitors catalogue.
  • Compare brand size saturation with your own store.
  • Look for products on offer and calculate the percentage of the price reduction.
  • Monitor the competitive landscape.
  • Have the insight to make fair and accurate price comparisons .
  • Combine SKUs (Product Codes) to make like for like comparisons.
  • Make better decisions for your business.

More References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_shopping_website

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  • Data feeds – This method has been used by a number of the larger comparison tools and necessitates the merchant setting up a file of product as well as pricing information and sending this for the comparison tool.
  • Web ‘crawling’ – In this method a search engine crawler visits all relevant websites and feeds the information back on the comparison tool.

Price comparison sites fail to charge users for that service they feature. Instead they are going to get paid via one of the following methods:

  • Flat fee internet marketing listed on the price comparison site
  • Fee per time a person clicks right through to a retailers web site
  •  Fee for each time a person buys something

What to stay away from – Tips to acquire the best out of comparison tools

There are a number of aspects to understand when you use a price comparison site:

  • Search results could be sorted based on the amount of payment received in the merchants listed on the website. It is therefore better to look through the list in lieu of assume the most effective price is in the top of this list.
  • Sponsored items may appear at the top of their email list. These may not really offer the cheapest price

One in the exciting development areas will be the origin of price comparison tools which scan other similar tools for price comparison and also retailer sites. This negates some of the issues that have been raised previously as users could very quickly review a number of price comparison sites to discover who is offering the most effective price.

This may very well be a hotly contested area as increasing numbers of shopping is done on the web and it becomes increasingly challenging to locate the specified information among the ever increasing data that’s being given to users

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