PriceGrabber Overview:

PriceGrabber is a comparison shopping engine, plus merchant storefront marketplace, where shoppers can browse millions of products from thousands of eTailers across over 300 different shopping sites within the PriceGrabber partner network. The PriceGrabber shopping engine includes several useful tools and features for both shoppers and product distributors including the ability to post comments, reviews, tracking tools and much more.

PriceGrabber uses is a cost per click (CPC) based pricing model and has the ability to list nearly any merchant, whether they have an existing site to sell from or not. Recently, CNET announced a brand new partnership with PriceGrabber which includes providing the product listings for CNET Shopping, ZDnet and mySimon. PriceGrabber continues to expand their strategic partnerships as the site grows.

Aaron Schiff Answers 10 Questions About PriceGrabber:

Roughly how many merchants are included within PriceGrabber?

PriceGrabber has over ~11,000 Merchants and Sellers

Roughly how many products are included within PriceGrabber?

PriceGrabber has ~26 million products on the site

Roughly how many individuals currently work on the PriceGrabber support and coding teams?

Per HR policy, we are not allowed to disclose this information.

What other places across the Internet, if any, are merchants and products included?

PriceGrabber.com partners with or powers over 300 shopping sites including MSN, AOL Shopping, About.com, CNET, Comcast, Terra, Bell South, Buy.com, USA TODAY and PC World to name a few.

What, in your opinion, are the highlight features PriceGrabber offers it’s users?

PriceGrabber.com offers many features and supplies the most complete product information for its user base of 24 million visitors per month. Our search results are based on popularity, meaning click-thrus to our merchants. The more clicks a product gets, the higher its ranking. Our products are listed according to popularity on the site, and this list is updated on a weekly basis.

In addition to our search functionality our users can add their comments and post reviews on products on Seller and Product Reviews. They can also participate in ecommerce by selling their own merchandise through our Storefronts program. Storefronts is our commission-based selling program for individuals with or without a website. If a user wants to sell a product that is in our database, they can signup with Storefronts account, and list the products they have to sell. PriceGrabber.com makes $1 + 5.75% of every sale. There are no listing fees for this service and you only pay us if a transaction is made.

What, in your opinion are the highlight features PriceGrabber offers merchants?

PriceGrabber puts the consumer first, and so I would say we are less-aligned to the merchant than to the consumer, but merchants may find our collaborative approach to creating product reports useful in getting feedback about the products they sell.We offer our merchants superior backend tools and customer service industry-high conversion rates and an unrivaled distribution network.

Our backend tools for our merchants make it very easy to track ROI. Merchants can view product level reporting and have this information exported to them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. In addition to our backend tools, PriceGrabber.com assigns an account manager to every merchant who signs up, regardless of the size or spend of the company. We have a dynamic account management team and ensure our merchant partners receive the very best campaigns and customer service for their accounts.

Based on the feedback we’ve received from our merchant partners, PriceGrabber.com is a leader in the industry in conversion rates. In October of 2006, Forrester Research came out with a study showing that Active Web Shoppers visit PriceGrabber more than any other CSE. Active Web Shoppers were defined as online consumers who spent at least $500 online during the past 3 months. 84% of these active shoppers purchased items after visiting a Comparison Shopping Engine and they were much more likely to use a Comparison Shopping Engine than the non-active web shoppers.

Finally, our distribution network provides unparalleled exposure to online shoppers. We are constantly adding valued partners such as AOL Shopping and CNET (going live in September). We have a large Business Development team focused on maintaining the highest quality partner sites on the web.

Are new features being added and updated often? How often would you say?

PriceGrabber.com is always working on innovation. One of our newest initiatives is our ShopGreen section. ShopGreen is PriceGrabber’s guide to low-impact and environmentally-friendly products. One of the unique features of ShopGreen is the daily blogs on products listed in ShopGreen and shows how everyone can make a difference in living a ‘greener’ lifestyle. The articles include links to specific “green” products. Additionally, another feature we are very excited about is our commitment to give back to the community by listing various charities on the site each month, and allowing our users to vote for their favorite eco-friendly charity. At the end of each month, PriceGrabber.com donates 5% of ShopGreen’s profits to the charity with the most votes. Feel free to visit http://shopgreen.pricegrabber.com/

How does PriceGrabber plan to stay competitive with sites like Amazon and eBay marketplaces?

We believe there is room for everyone in the shopping space.. Amazon is actually one of our merchants and lists their products on PriceGrabber.com. While there may be some overlap among the different sites, PriceGrabber.com’s loyal user base continues to thrive and grow.

Where do you see PriceGrabber in the next 3-5 years?

Companies always ask us “What about crawling technology?” “What about rev-share?” “What about zero-bids?” New technologies are heating up, and PriceGrabber is always looking to innovate, but PriceGrabber will stick with what has worked for us all these years: Using Merchant-generated information to provide the best user experience to our loyal shoppers. We feel there is a value to every click / referral we send to our merchants. If the merchant is getting free clicks, there is little incentive to provide an updated product feed. As far as zero-bids are concerned, this would completely undermine our Popularity Index. We want to show the users what’s popular, not who’s paying the highest CPC.

What Online product marketplaces, other than PriceGrabber, do you personally use to shop from?

Lots of them, I have tons of good shopping bookmarked on my website. I like using the auction sites for used merchandise, and the ticket sites for events. But I found all of my favorite online retailers through searching on PriceGrabber.com. That’s why I think PriceGrabber and even other Comparison Shopping Engine’s are so valuable, because if you like the website and you have a good experience, you just bookmark it and come back later. At least I do anyway.

Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

I learned a lot about PriceGrabber that I didn’t already know, like how many sites they currently have across their network and the vast assortment of products within their index. They power a lot of the most prominent names in Online shopping including AOL and MSN Shopping sites. I am impressed with how far they have come, especially as of lately. They must have some really talented individuals on their team, including Aaron, who was nice enough to provide us with the answers for this short, but sweet QandA.

It will be interesting to see how far they go within the CSE marketplace in the future. I am glad to hear that they will be sticking with what works, what their merchants request and with what shoppers would like to see (the most popular products)!

To Aaron: Thanks you so much for taking the time out of your hectic schedule to provide us answers straight from the source. You guys/gals are doing a great job over there and I can tell you have built a team that is passionate about comparison shopping and providing a quality place for shoppers and merchants to connect. Keep up the great work and feel free to drop in on use from time to time and let us know what’s new with PriceGrabber.

To our readers: We hope you enjoyed reading this QandA with Aaron from PriceGrabber. We plan on doing several more interviews with other comparison shopping engine founders, marketers and employees. If you haven’t already, be sure to grab our articles feed so you don’t miss any of our upcoming CSE and product listing site interviews!

PriceGrabber is Featured as one of the comparison shopping engines on our Product Listing Guide!