Pricesearcher

Last updated

Pricesearcher
Pricesearcher logo.png
Founded2011
OwnerPRICESEARCHER TECHNOLOGY GROUP LTD
Founder(s) "Samuel Dean Hussain McMurran". www.companieshouse.gov.uk. companies house. Retrieved 23 June 2016.
Industry Internet
URL pricesearcher.com
Launched2016;8 years ago (2016)

Pricesearcher was an independent e-commerce search engine launched in the UK in 2016 which now focussing on top 10 lists and providing lists based on sales with no price comparison functionality . [1] [2] It does not use the traditional Price Comparison Website (PCW) model adopted by comparison sites such as Moneysupermarket.com and search engines such as Google Shopping [3] [4] where retailers pay to list their products for sale. [5] Since its inception, it has listed products from online retailers, without charging a listing fee or commission for sales. Product search results are consequently unaffected by a retailer's marketing budget or lack thereof. Shoppers are able to use the vertical search engine as a price-checking tool, to see whether the goods they find 'on sale' elsewhere are genuinely a good deal.

Contents

History

Pricesearcher began as a small, self-funded project by Samuel Dean [2] in 2011, with the aim of indexing all products available to buy online to give shoppers a clear picture.

Dean used Peopleperhour in the early days to find freelancers to work on the initial project. Then in 2014, he recruited Raja Akhtar, a PHP specialist, and the two worked together in their spare time. Akhtar is now Head of Web Development at Pricesearcher. In 2015, they recruited a freelance DevOps engineer, Vlassios Rizopoulos, [6] to help speed up the product indexing process. In 2017, Rizopoulos became Pricesearcher's Chief Technology Officer. [2]

Their goal was to list a searched-for item in one view, from retailers, marketplaces, classified advertising sites, brands and shopping comparison sites. [2] As the product index increased, funding was sought. In 2016, Pricesearcher was launched and received its first outside seed funding from private investors.

Retailers who joined the Pricesearcher search engine in their first year were Amazon, [3] Argos, IKEA, Mothercare, Currys, PC World, Dreams (bed retailer), Wilko, King of Shaves, JD Sports. Many more have joined since. [3]

In September 2018, Pricesearcher was selected to join the London Stock Exchange's capital-raising programme. [7]

In October 2018, former Amazon UK Head of Pricing Weldon W. Whitener joined Pricesearcher as Chief Analytics officer. [8]

In January 2019, Pricesearcher becomes a Google CSS Partner (Comparison Shopping Services) [9]

In March 2019, Pi Datametrics and Pricesearcher Launched a Joint product for digital retailers "The first ever combining of organic search data and online product price data in a single report, PricePoint allows retailers to highlight where the winning pricing opportunities exist online, alongside organic visibility." [10]

Pricesearcher enters a new partnership with latestdeals.co.uk where their technology is powering product search and product comparison for their consumers. [11] Latestdeals.co.uk is a uk website dedicated to the promotion of deals, vouchers, and freebies.

Pricesearcher Ltd went into administration on 12 March 2020 [12]

On 20 March, Founder Samuel Dean and Jack Sundt formed a new business, Pricesearcher Technology Group Ltd [13]

Technology

Pricesearcher uses PriceBot, its custom web crawler, to search the web for prices, and it allows direct product feeds from retailers at no cost. [3] The search engine's rapid growth [3] has been attributed to its enabling technology: a retailer can upload their product feed in any format, without the need for further development. Pricesearcher processes 1.5 billion prices every day and uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), to which it migrated in December 2016, to enable the high volume of data processing required. [14] The rest of the business uses algorithms, NLP, Machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence to organise all the data.

As of February 2018, Pricesearcher is processing 2,500 UK retailers through PriceBot. A further 4,000 retailers are using product feeds to submit product information to the search engine. [2]

Web crawler

Like Google's web crawler, GoogleBot, [15] PriceBot identifies online retailers and crawls their websites looking for products that are being sold. Retailers can submit their own websites for crawling by PriceBot. [3]

Business model

Pricesearcher is free to use for both shoppers and retailers. It operates like Google and indeed.com as a free-to-list search engine. Future revenue will come from an Adwords-type advertising model; the most traditional advertising model for search engines [2]

Research

Data collected by Pricesearcher was presented at the Brighton SEO Conference in a presentation: "What we have learnt from indexing over half a billion products". [2] Using the first 500 million products, Pricesearcher found that the average length of a product title was 48 characters (including spaces). Product descriptions averaged 522 characters, or 90 words. 44.9% included shipping costs. 40.2% did not provide dimensions such as size and colour. [2] Their research shows that many retailers could improve their product listings by using brand terms as product keywords, using GTINs and putting product attributes in separate fields. [16]

Between December 2016 and September 2017, Pricesearcher recorded 4 billion price changes globally. The country with the most price changes was the UK – one every six days. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon (company)</span> American multinational technology company

Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies; the other four are Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

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">HotBot</span> VPN company; former search engine

HotBot is a Canadian web search engine owned by HotBot Limited, whose key principal is Kristen Richardson. According to the website itself, the current domain has been relaunched in 2022 under new ownership and with a different technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A9.com</span> Subsidiary of Amazon based in Palo Alto, California

A9.com was a former subsidiary of Amazon that developed search engine and search advertising technology. A9 was based in Palo Alto, California, with teams in Seattle, Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Iași, Munich and Tokyo. A9 has development efforts in areas of product search, cloud search, visual search, augmented reality, advertising technology and community question answering.

<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.

Amazon Marketplace is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Amazon that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used products directly to consumers on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Amazon's regular offerings. Using Amazon Marketplace, third-party sellers gain access to Amazon's customer base, and Amazon expands the offerings on its site without having to invest in additional inventory.

Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999.

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.

Product information management (PIM) is the process of managing all the information required to market and sell products through distribution channels. This product data is created by an internal organization to support a multichannel marketing strategy. A central hub of product data can be used to distribute information to sales channels such as e-commerce websites, print catalogues, marketplaces such as Amazon and Google Shopping, social media platforms like Instagram and electronic data feeds to trading partners. Moreover, the significant role that PIM plays is reducing the abandonment rate by giving better product information.

A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

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.

Bizrate Insights Inc., trading as Bizrate Insights, is a market research company that provides consumer ratings information to their customers. A Dotdash Meredith company, Bizrate Insights is based in Los Angeles, California.

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.

An online shopping directory is a "Yellow Pages-Style" web directory that specializes in ecommerce sites. Inspired by the organizational structure used in traditional shopping mall directories, online shopping directories organize ecommerce sites by their category and subcategory of goods sold. Without the constraints related to shopping at a physical mall, an online shopping directory serves to aggregate all ecommerce sites in one centralized location in order to help a user decide where to shop online.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NexTag</span> Price comparison service

Nextag was an independent price comparison service website for products, travel, and education. It started as a website where buyers and sellers could negotiate prices for computers and electronics products. From 2000, the business model focused on comparison shopping. NexTag also owned Hamburg, Germany-based Guenstiger.de. It provided functionality for tracking the historical prices of a product across various sellers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reverse image search</span> Content-based image retrieval

Reverse image search is a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) query technique that involves providing the CBIR system with a sample image that it will then base its search upon; in terms of information retrieval, the sample image is very useful. In particular, reverse image search is characterized by a lack of search terms. This effectively removes the need for a user to guess at keywords or terms that may or may not return a correct result. Reverse image search also allows users to discover content that is related to a specific sample image or the popularity of an image, and to discover manipulated versions and derivative works.

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wish (company)</span> American online e-commerce platform

Wish is an American online e-commerce platform for transactions between sellers and buyers. Wish was founded in 2010 by Piotr Szulczewski and Danny Zhang.

References

  1. ↑ "10 ways to have a cheaper Christmas". www.independent.co.uk. The Independent. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Pricesearcher: The biggest search engine you've never heard of". Search Engine Watch. ClickZ Group Limited. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "UK startup takes on Google with 'first ever comprehensive, unbiased shopping search engine'". www.independent.co.uk. The Independent.
  4. ↑ "Opinion: Google Shopping changes – the start of a fairer playing field". www.retail-week.com. Retail Week. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  5. ↑ "Sell products online with Google Shopping Campaigns". www.google.com. Google. Retrieved 24 January 2018.
  6. ↑ "Brighton SEO speakers". BrightonSeo.com. BrightonSEO. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  7. ↑ "Google rival Pricesearcher among private firms to join stock exchange capital-raising scheme". City Am. 17 September 2018. Retrieved 28 September 2018.
  8. ↑ "Pricesearcher Hires ex-Amazon UK Head of Pricing". www.webretailer.com. 5 October 2018. Retrieved 5 November 2018.
  9. ↑ "Google Comparison Shopping Services is a win for Pricesearcher". tamebay.com. 28 January 2019. Retrieved 28 January 2019.
  10. ↑ "New partners launch first joint product for digital retailers – Pi PricePoint". www.pi-datametrics.com/. 5 March 2019. Retrieved 5 March 2019.
  11. ↑ "Tools and tricks that help you get money off EVERYTHING you buy online". mirror.co.uk. 8 July 2019. Retrieved 8 July 2019.
  12. ↑ "Pricesearcher Goes into Administration". thegazette.co.uk. 12 March 2020. Retrieved 12 March 2020.
  13. ↑ "Pricesearcher Technology Group is formed". companieshouse.gov.uk. 20 March 2020. Retrieved 20 March 2020.
  14. ↑ "CIO interview: Vlassios Rizopoulos, CTO, Pricesearcher.com". Computerweekly.com. Computer Weekly. Retrieved 23 February 2018.
  15. ↑ "Googlebot". www.Google.com. Google.
  16. ↑ "Is your product feed as good as you thought it was". Tamebay.com. 6 March 2018. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
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