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.
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I’m talking with Martin Andersen, GM of PriceRunner (a ValueClick company) tomorrow, but here’s the official press release. One really interesting aspect of PriceRunner is it’s integration of offline listings. The company employs ‘In-Store PriceRunners’ who “visit stores in your local area with a pen and pad at regular intervals to collect prices on assigned products that will be posted on the Pricerunner website.” (http://www.pricerunner.com/jobs.html)

I applied (you have to e-mail your request) to become a merchant on PriceRunner (my test store is PersonalProtectionStore.com), but never heard back from the Content Manager.

More soon…