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The website PriceRunner is a price comparison service launched in Sweden in 1999, and since bought by ValueClick. It allows users to compare prices on a range of products. The headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, and it also has offices in London, Munich, Paris and California.
History PriceRunner was launched in 1999 as a price comparison service based in Sweden and originally financed by a venture capitalist group called Cell Ventures, who were later acquired by NewMedia Spark. It launched the service in the UK and Denmark in 2000. Initially, they had planned to become a pan-European service, but some of these services were closed down in 2002 after poor financial performance. In August 2004, it was acquired by ValueClick, an online media company, for £16 million ($29 million). Further expansion saw PriceRunner reopen the French office in August 2004, go into Germany in October of the same year, and the US in October 2005. In 2006, it announced that it would launch a partnership service with 118118, a UK phone based service, to provide prices to people by SMS. This followed an earlier failure to enter the mobile market in 2002 by providing price tracking through the site. Technology PriceRunner uses a combination of screen scraping retailers' websites and files supplied by the retailers themselves. These prices are matched against a backend database. This is done by using both a fuzzy logic automatching system, and manually by admin staff. Business Model PriceRunner is similar to other price comparison services in that it is financed by advertisers, who pay on a pay per click model. It also uses web banners provided by sister company, vcmedia. Differentiators from main competition Similar to Froogle, it opts to feature all retailers and sorts by price. This is in contrast to the Kelkoo and Shopping.com model, which features only paying retailers and allows them to bid for position in the rankings. It also features a forum, product reviews, retailer reviews, and extensive product information. In this respect, it is closer to such as Ciao.com and Dooyoo.com. Notes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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