eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and an additional or separate fee when those items are sold.
Asda Stores Ltd. is a British supermarket chain. It is headquartered in Leeds, England. The company was founded in 1949 when the Asquith family merged their retail business with the Associated Dairies company of Yorkshire. It expanded into Southern England during the 1970s and 1980s, and acquired Allied Carpets, 61 large Gateway Supermarkets and other businesses, such as MFI Group. It sold these acquisitions during the 1990s to concentrate on the supermarkets. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until 1999 when it was acquired by Walmart for £6.7 billion. Asda was the second-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2014 by market share, at which point it fell into third place.
Experian is an American–Irish multinational consumer credit reporting company. Experian collects and aggregates information on over 1 billion people and businesses including 235 million individual U.S. consumers and more than 25 million U.S. businesses.
Carcraft was an independent group of used car hypermarkets established in 1951 in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England, with eleven locations around the country. Stocking cars from Alfa Romeo to Volvo. Carcraft was established by Frank McKee, and was bought out in July 1998 by his sons Noel and Darren McKee. This was in a £50 million deal, backed by the Royal Bank of Scotland's Development Capital arm.
Hurley is an American company that sells clothes and accessories marketed towards surfing and swimming. Established in 1979 as a distributor for Billabong clothing in the United States, Hurley was sold to Nike, Inc. in 2002 for an undisclosed price and then to Bluestar Alliance LLC in 2019 for an undisclosed price.
Etsy, Inc. is an American e-commerce company focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home décor and furniture, toys, art, as well as craft supplies and tools. Items described as vintage must be at least 20 years old. The site follows in the tradition of open craft fairs, giving sellers personal storefronts where they list their goods for a fee of US$0.20 per item.
Moneysupermarket.com Group PLC is a British price comparison website-based business specialising in financial services. The website enables consumers to compare prices on a range of products, including energy, car insurance, home insurance, travel insurance, mortgages, credit cards and loans. The company's subsidiaries include the Travel Supermarket and Moneysavingexpert websites. Moneysupermarket Group is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Connexity is a privately held Los Angeles operator of shopping web sites, including Shopzilla.com. Originally started as comparison shopping website Bizrate.com, the company changed its name to Shopzilla in 2004, and changed again to Connexity in 2014.
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., doing business as Bizrate Insights, is a market research company, providing consumer ratings information to over 6,000 retailers and publishers across the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada. Bizrate Insights is a Meredith Corporation company based in Los Angeles, CA.
Greenergy International Ltd is a British distributor of petrol and diesel for motor vehicles and has over a quarter of the UK market. It blends fuels at terminals on the Thames estuary in the south and on Teesside in the north. It sells more than 20 million litres of petrol and diesel a day. As of 2015 it is currently ranked at 474 in the Fortune 500 list of largest companies by revenue.
Hitwise is a division of Connexity, that measures behavior across desktop, tablet and smartphone devices. Hitwise provides marketers with online insights to help them understand, track and grow market share. Using Hitwise, marketers can define, understand and target audiences to optimize their multi-channel marketing campaigns. Hitwise enables users to not only understand how traffic moves between websites and industries, but also who the audiences are behind that traffic. Hitwise can identify who these audiences are, both on and offline, to provide a complete 360 real time view of the consumer.
LowerMyBills.com is a consumer finance corporate website that connects prospective mortgage borrowers to lenders. The site connects consumers who respond to their marketing with service providers.
Kamran Pourzanjani is an entrepreneur and an early angel investor based in Los Angeles, California. He co-founded and was formerly the CEO of PriceGrabber, a comparison shopping site started in 1999 with less than $1.5 million in angel funding. In October 2006 a Forrester Research independent survey recognized PriceGrabber as the most popular comparison shopping site among active web shoppers. PriceGrabber was acquired by Experian in December 2005 for an enterprise value of $485 million.
Credit Karma is an American multinational personal finance company founded in 2007, which has been a brand of Intuit since December 2020. It is best known as a free credit and financial management platform, but its features also include monitoring of unclaimed property databases and a tool to identify and dispute credit report errors. The company operates in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Imagination Technologies Limited is a British semiconductor and software design company owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, a private equity fund based in Beijing that is ultimately owned by the Chinese government. With its global headquarters in Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, its primary business is in the design of PowerVR mobile graphics processors (GPUs), neural network accelerators for AI processing, and networking routers. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange until it was acquired in November 2017 by Canyon Bridge.
Sedo is a domain name and website marketplace and domain parking provider based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cologne, Germany. The company is a subsidiary of United Internet.
The Brightcom Group is a digital marketing company founded in 2000 and headquartered in Hyderabad, India with offices in US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Ukraine, Serbia, Israel, China, India, and Australia, and with representatives or partners in Poland, and Italy. It ranked 400th in the Fortune India 500 list in 2020.
Direct Line Insurance Group plc is a British insurance company based in the United Kingdom, formed in 2012 by the divestment of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group's (RBS) insurance division, through an initial public offering. The company owns a number of insurance subsidiaries, providing various insurance products, including Direct Line and Churchill, Darwin as well as the roadside assistance and vehicle recovery provider Green Flag.
Raise.com is an e-commerce platform owned and operated by Raise that enables third-party sellers to sell new or used Gift Cards on a fixed-price online marketplace alongside Raise's regular offerings. The company is based in Chicago, Illinois, and was launched in 2013 by founder George Bousis, who still remains the Executive Chairman today alongside CEO Jay Klauminzer.
