When PriceRunner officially launched a month ago, I was skeptical. While new features or slightly different strategies can make a shopping comparison engine stand out, it’s not going to ensure survival. Besides attracting consumers, the comparison engines also have to attract merchants.

This can be a slightly difficult task when any serious internet marketer using comparison engines is already listing products on Froogle, NexTag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Yahoo! Shopping. Additionally, that busy internet marketer might be testing out Become.com, Smarter.com, and a host of specialized engines. A lot to manage when you take into consideration the sign up process (you have to fax a contract to the engines- sometimes a 15 page contract!), the feed (creation, submission, and dealing with hundreds of small errors), placement (categorization issues), bidding/sponsorship, title/description optimization, etc.

Just as in the PPC game, it’s a pain in the ass to manage multiple accounts. With my former SEM clients, I stopped advertising on LookSmart, MIVA (FindWhat), IndustryBrains, etc. and focused my time on YSM (Overture) and Google Adwords. While I recognized the value of working with the smaller PPC engines, it just came down to directing my resources where I could get the most volume in conjunction with the best ROI.

So how is a new entrant going to make a splash in this already crowded pool? How do you attract the merchants?

I think that’s the genius of PriceRunner. Through ValueClick, PriceRunner has access to the web’s largest online advertising network. ValueClick owns ValueClick Media, Commission Junction (CJ), MediaPlex, and soon, FastClick.

While it remains to be seen how and when PriceRunner will leverage the various ValueClick properties, I’m sure you can see the potential. Yes, the consumer experience is also an extremely important piece of the puzzle and it will be difficult to wrestle significant market share or mindshare from the established players, but with consumer focused programs like PriceRunners, the company has potential.

I talked with Martin Anderson from PriceRunner a month ago, right after the official US launch. I want to apologize to him for not getting this up sooner.

Background…
Martin Anderson relocated here from Denmark about 4 months ago. He’s been with PriceRunner since 2000. Before Pricerunner, he owned his own comparison engine that focused on the computer category. He sold the company in 1999 and was contacted by PriceRunner where he soon became the operations director. Martin built up PriceRunner in Europe including the company’s operations in Denmark, UK, France, and Germany. PriceRunner was bought by ValueClick in 2004 and the company recently launched in the US. PriceRunner is an independent company within the ValueClick group. ValueClick has been focused on B2B, and PriceRunner company’s only B2C property.

Can you provide some launch statistics…
“We currently have 20 categories including most of the important ones. We decided to focus on where we will get the revenue and what consumers care about. We have Consumer Electronics, Home & Garden, Perfumes, Appliances, and obviously Photography, Home Entertainment, and Clothing.”

“We’re launching with about 4000 merchants. We crawl about 50% of the sites and might or might not have a relationship with those merchants. The other 50% is from feeds. We obviously have a close relationship with Commission Junction (CJ), but the CJ feeds only represent a small percentage of our merchants. It’s a manual process for us, we go into CJ and select the type of publisher we’re interested in displaying. We also have offline PriceRunners who go out and collect prices directly from stores.”

“We can’t disclose the number of individual SKUs. We’re currently building the product database, adapting what we had in Europe, and scaling it. There are many more products covered in the US.”

“What makes PriceRunner different than other comparison engines?
- We display online and offline prices. We have a team of people called PriceRunners in major cities who go into major retailers and check prices. We’re giving consumers an idea of what they’d expect to see if they went directly to the store.”

- “We always list the lowest price first, regardless of whether the merchant is or is not paying.”

- “We list all merchants regardless of payment and regardless of whether the retailer is good for the consumer. We care for the consumer. If a merchant is not delivering or keeping up with promises, PriceRunner will display that company, but will also display a warning signal. We make it clear to user that he should be careful when dealing with this merchant. We could have excluded [these types of merchants], but then lots of consumers might have dealt with them.”

On how PriceRunner will market to consumers…
“We need to be where consumers are and the other comparison engines are. We are using PPC and CPM marketing, but there are other areas we’re interested in such as blogs and forums. Affiliate marketing will play a big role, too. We’re not doing anything offline right now. We need to focus and find ways that drive the best traffic to us. We’ll measure the ROI from online marketing and later on we’ll do the other stuff.”

“Then there’s the ValueClick network. We’re next to companies that sell to millions of unique users. The ValueClick Media network reaches aproximately 70mm unique users in the US.”

“Co-branding is a part of strategy, too. We have already closed some deals which we’ll announce in a couple weeks.” [Editors Note: Since the interview, PriceRunner has announced a deal with FortuneCity]

“Most important, though, is the organic traffic and word of mouth. 90% of traffic for PriceRunner Sweeden is organic (word of mouth, people typing in directly, and organic search). We won’t be able to adopt the same percentages in the US, but our mission here is to build the same trust with the users.”

How will you market to merchants? Will sales people at ValueClick or CJ upsell PriceRunner? How tightly integrated are you to leverage this potential?
“We don’t have a clear strategy right now, but if there is anything we can do to provide the merchant with a package of advertising, we will. We have close connections with the other groups on how we can help the merchants. We are definitely working together.”

How can merchants benefit from PriceRunner?
“Because we concentrate on building trust with the consumers, the ROI for the merchant is going to be high. We will have higher conversion rates than other similar businesses. We try to guide the users through the whole process; through user guides, filters, price, etc., which helps them determine exactly what to buy. With PriceRunner, we want to educate the users before they go to the merchant, there isn’t a focus just on price. In the end , we’re able to provide merchants with better buyers.”