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Price comparison engine

A price comparison engine is a website where shoppers compare one product's offers from many shops, then click through to buy on the chosen shop's own site.

How it works

You send the site a product feed in the format it sets, and it uses product matching to put offers for one item on a single product card. Shoppers compare price, delivery and the shop, then click through to the shop’s own site to buy. That is why the European Commission’s competition guidelines treat these sites as an advertising channel, not a sales channel. Heureka also runs Heureka Marketplace, where shoppers buy on Heureka itself; that part works as a marketplace.

Heureka.cz, Zboží.cz and Hotline charge per click. Heureka.cz bases the click price on the product’s price and adjusts it by category. Zboží.cz runs an auction above a minimum set per category and price band, and Hotline charges a base price per unique click. Sites by market: comparison shopping engines in Europe and Ukraine.

To see the site’s visits and orders separately in analytics, tag the product links in its feed with UTM parameters.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop pays Google Shopping 5 a click for 8,000 clicks: 40,000 of spend for 300 orders and 180,000 of revenue. On a comparison site it pays 2 a click for 6,000 clicks, or 12,000. At a 1.5% conversion rate that is 90 orders at 600, or 54,000. The cheaper clicks convert less often, so both channels cost 133 per order and spend 22.2% of revenue.

Not to be confused with

  • Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) — a partner that bids for Shopping ads on Google on behalf of the shops it represents. In 21 European countries, Czechia and Slovakia among them, only a CSS can place Shopping ads; Ukraine is not on the list.
  • Online marketplace — the shopper buys on the platform itself. The Commission’s guidelines classify services where shoppers complete the purchase as marketplaces.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Every click on a comparison site costs the same.” Right: on Hotline, when shoppers sort by price and more than five shops offer the product, first place costs 10.5 UAH a click against a base of 7.5 UAH. So the cheapest offer, listed first, pays the highest of the position rates.

Sources