I talked with Ron LaPierre, Vice President of Business Development at PriceGrabber. Ron has been with the company since April 2002. Prior to his position at PriceGrabber, Ron worked at Overture where he was responsible for the MSN and Ask Jeeves relationships.

How is PriceGrabber different than the other shopping comparison engines?
“Comparison shopping sites have become very popular. We’ve been at the forefront of the growth by focusing on innovation and user experience. Everything we do is with the user in mind.
We focus on many items but a few of the most important are accuracy, transparency, and comprehensiveness. Early on, we added “Bottom Line Price” which allows a user to enter their zip code so tax and shipping costs can be calculated correctly. Most of the other comparison shopping engines today have followed us with this feature, but what you’ll find is that we offer Bottom Line Price across a higher percentage of products and for a higher percentage of our merchant partners.”

How about on the merchant front?
“If you focus on the user, it will benefit the merchant, too. On PriceGrabber, the user has a wealth of information including accurate product listings, user reviews, professional reviews, product condition, rebate information, etc., and all this information is there to help get them as far down the buying path as possible. By the time they click on the merchant’s listing, they are an extremely qualified buyer. Combine those factors with our extremely clean and simple user interface, and we are in a position to be able to deliver an industry leading ROI to our merchant partners.”

What are PriceGrabber’s strengths?
“The last couple years, we’ve added to the breadth of the product offerings. I would have called it a weakness 2 yrs ago, but there’s been a significant focus on adding channels. However, we only do it when it makes sense and when we can deliver the same, consistent high quality user experience that our users get in our existing channels. We now offer our users a comprehensive comparison shopping experience across 21 popular product categories, so we have met, and in some cases, significantly passed others in our space so what was a shortcoming is clearly now a strength.”

“On the international side, we launched our UK site in May of last year. We also have sites for Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. We offer a version of our site in Spanish and actively market to the Hispanic community through relationships with MSN and Terra.com, among other sites. We are also rolling out our Spanish site with other partners such as Bell South.”

“We offer many innovative features such as shopping lists. Some people want to shop for more than one item. We heard from users that it’s frustrating that they have to do the math to figure out if it’s best to buy all items from one store or from multiple stores, so we allow users to identify all the products they are interested in purchasing in a simple user interface. They are able to see prices from the complete list of individual merchants, as well as a list of those merchants who have all the products they are looking for. The user can then easily make a buying decision of whether it makes sense to buy from from a number of merchants or from one single store.”

“We also make it easy for individuals and small businesses without websites to sell products online through our StoreFronts feature. StoreFronts has become an important feature we offer buyers and sellers who visit PriceGrabber, and we expect it to become even more significant in the future.”

What are your most popular categories?
“Computers and Consumer Electronics, but like all the comparison engines, we’ve seen a significant amount of growth in Home & Garden, Apparel, and Sporting Goods. The growth percentages in these softer categories are outstripping that of the more established categories.”

How many merchants do you have on your site?
“We have 8000 sellers which includes both StoreFronts sellers and our traditional merchant partners.”

How do you market the site?
“We use a mix of different marketing channels. We’ve tested billboards and print advertising. Pay-per-click is part of the marketing mix, but not necessary the key part. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has not been that big of a focus either. The most successful is word of mouth from our users, which goes back to the fact that focusing on a great user experience will lead to organic growth.”

“Also, co-brands are a key part of the business. PriceGrabber powers comparison shopping for almost 300 sites. This is a core part of what PriceGrabber has focused on since the beginning. The infrastructure has been built to be able to offer customized, unique programs for our partners. We can add a lot of value for a partner because it doesn’t feel to the user that they are being sent somewhere else. We have a large, diverse group of co-brand partners which range from general portals to vertical enthusiast sites. AskJeeves, Comcast, About.com, PC World, TechBargains, and Geek.com are just a few examples.”

What can you add about your recent deal with MSN Shopping?
“This demonstrates the value that MSN sees in the functionality and content of PriceGrabber. They want to expand their breadth and depth of products. We offer them millions of offers from thousands of merchants. MSN Shopping’s users will have a much larger selection of merchants and products to shop and buy from through our partnership.”

You’ve been working with AskJeeves since the end of 2002. Can you tell me more about the relationship? When does the deal end?
“It’s a long term deal. The partnership has been renewed a couple times. We’ve been impressed with their unique approach to offering their users spot on relevant results in terms of search experience and how they’ve focused on long term user experience.”

How do you work on loyalty/retention?
“We’re focused on doing a great job for the user. Users can create an account, sign up for price alerts, etc. With our Price Alert feature, we offer users the ability to specify a product, indicate a target price point, and even pick a preferred merchant or group of merchants they are interested in buying from, and when the product becomes available at their target price from one of their selected merchants we’ll send them an email alert. There are other features available through a PriceGrabber account, but it’s more about what PriceGrabber doesn’t do to frustrate users. We have a strict rule against pop-up advertising and spyware on the site. We have never used adware or spyware on PriceGrabber and will not do so in the future. The key is to make sure our users have a great experience, come back themselves, and tell their friends. Because of our focus on the user, we’ve seen significant growth. According to our logs, we currently have 18m unique users/month.”

Details on the Auto Channel
“It’s a really interesting channel. We looked at the space and felt that no one was delivering the true value of comparison shopping when it comes to buying a new car. On PriceGrabber, as opposed to just specifying make and model, you can completely configure your car and see what dealers are selling it for. We created our own technology to interact with the auto dealers directly and have begun to set up our own national network of dealer partners.”

“We send an invitation to all the local dealers with details on the users completely configured car. Basically, we say to the dealers, we have a shopper who has configured a car in a certain way. Come back to us and tell us how much you’re willing to sell it for. At the end of the process, the user will have a number of price quotes from local dealers to review on a special page we create for them on PriceGrabber.com. They’re able to avoid the haggling of emails and phone calls from dealers, and instead evaluate their options from their home or office, and make a sound decision on which dealer they’d like to do business with. The other comparison engines are just pushing the users to aggregator sites which then resell the leads to dealers. With PriceGrabber, the users get real quotes directly from dealers; they don’t get bombarded by unwanted calls and emails without any pricing information.”

“From the dealer prospective, this is an attractive offering because they don’t have to pay multiple resellers for the same lead. PriceGrabber confirms the email address before sending out the lead and will soon launch an automated phone call to the user to further qualify the lead. Qualification goes up resulting in a higher ROI for the dealers.”

How does the travel channel work? Why is it in BETA?
“It’s all done real-time. We have a relationship with all the brands on the sites and the brands either allow us to crawl their sites or they provide us with a dynamic real-time XML feed.”

“We don’t want to start driving traffic to a channel until its ready. There’s still work to be done: Adding content (reviews for hotels, images) mapping technology, working on SKU association of hotels, etc. Users will be able to click on the hotel they are interested in, and see who has the best price, the hotel itself or someone else, and see what other travelers have had to say about their experience with the hotel, what attractions are near the hotel, find directions for getting there, etc.”

General Industry Comments:
“The recent acquisitions further validate the success and long term growth potential of online shopping. More and more people are using the comparison engines every year. It’s great that these guys [eBay and EW Scripps] recognize the potential. We’re still in the early stages of growth. With broadband and increased connectivity, there’s a lot of opportunity.”