Idealo

Last updated
idealo.de
Idealo Logo RGB blue white letters.svg
Type of site
GmbH
Available inGerman, English, Italian, French, Spanish
Headquarters Berlin,
Germany
Owneridealo internet GmbH
Founder(s) Martin Sinner, Dr. Albrecht von Sonntag, Christian Habermehl & others
CEODr. Albrecht von Sonntag
Jörn Rehse
Services Price comparison
Operating income €52,612,705.01 (2012)
Employees1100 (2022) [1]
Parent Axel Springer SE (74,9%)
URL idealo.de
RegistrationNot required
Current statusOnline

idealo internet GmbH is a German price comparison service launched in Germany in 2000, and since bought by the Axel Springer AG publishing company. The headquarters are in Berlin, Germany. The idealo website allows users to compare prices on a range of products from hundreds of shops.

Contents

The company invested 2011 an undisclosed amount of money in Sparheld International GmbH which operates various coupon portals across Europe, including Sparheld.de in Germany and Reduc.fr in France. [2]

History

The company was founded by Martin Sinner, Albrecht von Sonntag, Christian Habermehl and others in 2000, using €500,000 in venture capital (of which €350,000 from KfW). [3] In July 2006, Axel Springer bought a 74.9% majority interest in idealo internet GmbH for an undisclosed sum. [4] Its 2012 revenues were €52,612,705.01. [5]

Technology

The idealo sites use a combination of screen scraping retailers' websites and CSV files supplied by the retailers themselves to create a unique database of product offers that is filtered by real people. These prices are matched against a bespoke backend database of products and this matching process is carried out by using a fuzzy logic automated matching system as well as large teams of people also acting as a quality control filter.

Business model

idealo is a consumer review and price comparison website that is similar to other price comparison services in that it is financed by advertisers on traffic quantities as well as quality. Companies advertising their products on idealo track user traffic and clicks through tracking pixels. [6]

Product offers displayed on the idealo website are normally ordered by price where the lowest is shown at the top of any listing, however on product listing pages the products are ordered by price, popularity, user rating or test results. Some other comparison shopping website such as Kelkoo and Shopping.com may feature only paying retailers and allow them to bid for position in the rankings.[ citation needed ]

Each idealo product page also features a place for product reviews and shows a trend graph of each product costs over time.

In 2019, Idealo stated it struggles to compete with other services like Google Shopping. [7]

Notes

  1. "Home – idealo careers". idealo internet GmbH.
  2. "Über uns ≫ Gutscheinsammler.de". Gutscheinsammler.de.
  3. "Unsere 15 Besten". Berliner Morgenpost. 19 August 2012.
  4. "Springer kauft Preissuchmaschine idealo". Handelsblatt . 25 July 2006. Archived from the original on 28 February 2007.
  5. "Bundesanzeiger". Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
  6. "Case Study: idealo". Ingenious Technologies AG. Retrieved 2019-01-30.
  7. Foo Yun Chee (2019-11-28). "Axel Springer unit, others say Google still playing unfairly, want EU to act". Reuters. Retrieved 2019-11-28.

Related Research Articles

Google Shopping, formerly Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle, is a Google service created by Craig Nevill-Manning which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendors. Google announced at its Marketing Live event in May 2019 that the new Google Shopping will integrate the existing Google Express marketplace into a revamped shopping experience. In the US, Google Shopping is accessible from the web and mobile apps, available on Android and iOS. Google Shopping is also available in France, accessible from the web only. Like its predecessor, Google Shopping is free and requires a personal Google account in order to purchase from the platform. A colored price tag icon replaces the parachute icon from Google Express.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Online shopping</span> Form of electronic commerce

Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly or by searching among alternative vendors using a shopping search engine, which displays the same product's availability and pricing at different e-retailers. As of 2020, customers can shop online using a range of different computers and devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adblock Plus</span> Content-filtering and ad blocking browser extension

Adblock Plus (ABP) is a free and open-source browser extension for content-filtering and ad blocking. It is developed by Eyeo GmbH, a German software company. The extension has been released for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Safari, Yandex Browser, and Android.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ciao (website)</span>

Ciao was a European-based online-shopping portal with websites in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden. In February 2008, the company launched an American version of the site, Ciao.com. The site provided a forum where registered users could write reviews and give their opinions on a wide variety of products to help others make decisions. These reviews were available to the general public to help consumers, but also rated by other Ciao users on their usefulness on a scale ranging from exceptional to off-topic. Up to December 2017, when a review was read by a member, the author had money added to their account. Members could also receive money through online surveys and referring friends. On 27 November 2017, Ciao announced that from 1 December all payments would be stopped. In February 2018, Ciao was closed down. Ciao was free to sign up for.

A product feed or product data feed is a file made up of a list of products and attributes of those products organized so that each product can be displayed, advertised or compared in a unique way. A product feed typically contains a product image, title, product identifier, marketing copy, and product attributes. But, can also contain links to rich media assets such as videos, 3D animations, brochures, product stories, product relations, and reviews, as in the case of Open Icecat, the multilingual open content catalogue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Axel Springer SE</span> Large multimedia company in Europe

Axel Springer SE is a German multinational mass and online media company, based in Berlin, Germany. The company offers printing and publishing of advertisements, digital classifieds portfolio, marketing models and related services. Axel Springer's operations are segmented into News Media, Classifieds Media, and Marketing Media. The company is organized as a societas Europaea (SE) publishing house and is one of the largest mass media publishers in the European Union, with numerous multimedia news brands, such as Bild, Die Welt, Fakt, and the US political news site Politico, which Axel Springer acquired in 2021.

A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements. In the United Kingdom, these services made between £780m and £950m in revenue in 2005. Hence, E-commerce accounted for an 18.2 percent share of total business turnover in the United Kingdom in 2012. Online sales already account for 13% of the total UK economy, and its expected to increase to 15% by 2017. There is a huge contribution of comparison shopping websites in the expansion of the current E-commerce industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spread Group</span> Custom merchandising platform

Spread Group is the umbrella brand of five internationally active e-commerce platforms with headquarters in Leipzig, Germany and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, United States. It operates production sites in Legnica, Poland, Krupka, Czech Republic and Henderson, Nevada, United States. Founded in 2002 as a student start-up, the name "Spreadshirt" has become part of today's group of companies: Spreadshirt Create Your Own, Spreadshirt Marketplaces, Spreadshop, TeamShirts and SPOD.

Bing Shopping is a products search and discovery service that helps save time by bringing products from multiple sellers together on a single website. It uses Bing to show product results–including photos and product details. Products can be filtered and prices compared. Purchases are completed on the seller's website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United Internet</span> German internet services company

United Internet AG is a global Internet services company headquartered in Montabaur, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The company is structured in two business areas, Access and Applications, and has a total of 16 brands and numerous subsidiaries. The well-known brands under the umbrella of United Internet AG include 1&1, IONOS, Fasthosts, GMX, WEB.DE and 1&1 Versatel.

mySupermarket was an independent shopping and comparison shopping website for groceries in the United Kingdom. It retrieved price information from multiple online retailers, so that customers could compare their prices. On 27 February 2020 Gilad Simhony announced it would be closing on 1 March 2020. His statement read: "After 14 years of service to UK shoppers, the mySupermarket website and mobile application will be taken down from March 1st, 2020 as we shift our activity toward other business areas. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the tens of millions of you who have used our services over the years and who have contributed to its amazing success. It has been our pleasure and privilege to serve you and to share this journey with you."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jimdo</span> German web hosting service

Jimdo is a German website builder privately held and headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with offices in Munich and Tokyo. Jimdo has two products, Creator and Dolphin, offering free and paid plans.

Like.com was a price comparison service website that billed itself as a "visual search engine for products".

Avira Operations GmbH & Co. KG is a German multinational computer security software company mainly known for its Avira Free Security antivirus software. Although founded in 2006, the Avira antivirus application has been under active development since 1986 through its predecessor company H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH. Since 2021, Avira has been owned by American software company NortonLifeLock, which also operates Norton, Avast and AVG. It was previously owned by investment firm Investcorp.

Twenga.com is an online open shopping search engine.

PricePanda is a price comparison shopping website and distributed content store, founded in 2012 by Christian Schiller and Louis Iskandar in Berlin. The managing director is Philip Wegener.

ePages Online shopping software

ePages is an e-commerce software that allows merchants to create and run online shops in the cloud. The number of shops based on ePages is currently 140,000 worldwide. ePages software is regularly updated due to its Software-as-a-Service model. An investor in the company is United Internet, with a 25% stake. ePages focuses upon distributing its products mainly through hosting providers, such as 1&1 Internet, Strato AG or Webfusion's brands Host Europe and 123-reg. Additional sales partners include logistics, telecoms, and yellow pages companies. The company collaborates with 80+ technology partners including online marketplaces, payment and logistics companies, and ERP vendors. ePages is headquartered in Hamburg, with additional offices in London, Barcelona, New York City and Jena.

Signa Holding GmbH is Austria's largest privately owned real estate company. Signa Holding GmbH announced insolvency proceedings at the end of November 2023. The company will apply for self-administration restructuring proceedings at the Commercial Court of Vienna.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trusted Shops</span>

Trusted Shops is a company founded in Cologne, Germany in 1999, which offers online shops and their customers trust-building services by means of a trustmark, a money-back guarantee process and a system of customer reviews. Online retailers are also provided with assistance in meeting legal requirements. Around 25,000 online shops display the trustmark as of July 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geizhals</span> Comparison shopping website

Geizhals, known in English as Skinflint Price Comparison, is a feature and price comparison website, focusing on, but not limited to, the German-speaking area. The product filters are managed by an editorial board. For notebooks it has 150 filters, and offers for each product type up to more than 100 different offers from online stores.