Slashdot Mirror
Pricegrabber Purchased for $485M
w98 writes "GUS PLC, the parent company of Experian Interactive, recently announced the acquisition of PriceGrabber.com for $485M plus expenses. Don Robert, Chief Executive Officer of Experian, commented: 'As a trusted and preferred comparison shopping destination, PriceGrabber.com has a leading position in a fast-growing market. When combined with the complementary skills, expertise and scale of Experian, in both Interactive and Marketing, we are very excited about the future growth prospects for PriceGrabber.com.'"
"we're very excited about pumping paying stores' ads right to the top of search results, with no regard to actual accuracy or trustworthiness of the vendors, while simultaneously trying to give the impression of validity."
Is there really something better and more important to write about than pricewatch? Speaking of which, how the hell do they make money?
They could have bought it for 20% less if they'd shopped around.
I see this too often - some obscure or mediocre website selling for a fortune, and then I realize that I need to start spending more time on my own project - LOL...
they should've froogled it, first...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
$485 mil at once, $49 mil over 10 weeks or $5 mil over 100 weeks?
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
$485M = $2*2*2*2*2*2*5*5*5*5*5*5*5*97
PriceGrabber.com has a leading position in highly factorizable prices.
Oh yay! Another corporate monolith! Too bad they spent $485mm on something that is sure to be made obselete by google within two years. Yeah, that was a smart move.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
While we who eat and breathe web stuff are not as likely to be taken in by the tactics pricegrabber and their ilk use to pump their paying customers and favourites products, this is apt to help them in terms of dealing with not so savvy folk cruising the net for their shopping. It's been shown that many people can't tell the difference between "real" reviews of products and bogus articles that are really nothing more than the web equivalent of infomercials. The reality is now the web is crowded with many people who have no concept of what they are doing out there and who literally believe much of what is written. This plays perfectly to that crowd. There's a reason spam goes on, and that is there is an awful lot of people out there who really seem to believe you can get a new Honda for forwarding e-mail. You go figure it out.
Personally I find the general purpose comparison shopping sites like Pricegrabber and Froogle very poor at getting relevant results for most products. They are usually not able to differentiate different products and either group unrelated products together or don't group related products together. Luckily there are lots of sites where you can comparison shop for very specific products, like Compare Cartridges for printer ink cartridges, AddAll for books, DVD Price Search for movie, Cheap-Subscription for magazines, etc.
Talk about synergy! "Please wait for the custom price individually selected just for you, while we run up a quick check of your credit history..."
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
Maybe it's just me but I've never been to PriceGrabber.com before...never even heard of them. And it's not like I'm a recluse on the net either. I'm sure 90% of the people I know haven't heard of PriceGrabber.com before.
Forget holding up the world for $100M ransom. I think that I'd take the frickin' website!
Obviously they are if there is $400+ million dollars in interest by the purchaser... but I know that these sites poll only a select few online stores and the prices are rarely all that great.
Occasionally I will check out what pricegrabber or mysimon has to say, but most likely it will point me to Amazon.com and a moderate price as my best bet. These types of sites really just seem like the *worst* possible place to compare prices due to their discretion of the included stores, this system just seems to ooze opportunities for corruption. Constantly pit two big sites against sites they know have higher prices and collect a nice kickback from the big sites.
A trustworthy and all-inclusive (or at least as close as possible) price comparison site would be very welcomed though. Maybe this will be it... heh, who am I kidding, if they are shelling out $485 mil they plan on raping folks for everything they got in any way they can.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Enter your ZIP CODE to see the final cost Pricegrabber from top rated online merchants.
the "PC - Linux" section doesn't return any result, search for "linux PC" on google and you'll get plenty of results. How accurate...
The True FOSS Skype Replacement
considering I am selling a mirror of PriceGrabber.com for ONLY $300 million ! Anyone interested ?
shopzilla sold in June for a little more than that.. expect major consolidation in this area...
IIRC, PriceGrabber was all about showing PriceRitePhoto -- the Brooklyn scamsters who would refund money stolen from customers only if they posted a good review -- as one of the better, trustworthy, lowest-price photo shops around.
Yup.
I'm gonna trust PriceGrabber. Fersure.
--
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"And while we're at it, we're pepetuating the myth that NOTHING trumps price when buying a product. Screw customer service, reputation, shipping time, return policies, reliability, selection, etc., it's ALL ABOUT THE MONEY."
And to be quite honest, Slashdot has more price whores reading and posting than I've ever seen in one place. It's all a race to the absolute bottom, isn't it?
Our business doesn't bother with Amazon, Pricegrabber, and all of the others because they do -zero- for brand recognition, and they encourage competition on pure price, which is bad for businesses, and ultimately (think long term, people), bad for consumers. Many of the businesses that advertise through these services are here today, gone tomorrow because in the race to the bottom, other minor things like making a profit are often overlooked. My business has good prices, but if somebody is interested in buying elsewhere (online or a big box store) because of a $0.25 price difference, quite honestly, we don't want their business, and we'll gladly give them directions to our competition. And, unless they're living in a cardboard box, we get most of those customers back once they realize that saving that nickel isn't worth all of the other headache involved.
I don't respond to AC's.
Back in the day, like '00, I used to use Pricewatch to cruise for cheap parts once I'd decided what I wanted to buy. They seemed honest then, though I haven't used the service in years as the local Fry's is only 10 minutes away and convenience will trump a $5 savings any day.
I'm wondering if there are any reputable review/comparison sites out there any more? I know that every single site I've seen that's just an accumulation of 'user' submitted reviews is total BS. But maybe there's room for some honesty supported by AdWords and referrer IDs?
Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?
Experian is one of those companies you know will do everything to screw over the consumer while making big money on their side. This is evidenced in how difficult it is to talk to a person when you call them to report fraud on your credit report.
Either Experian is going to run the site into the ground (because google and pricewatch will still be better), or Experian will figure out some way of making money off of it while screwing the consumer at the same time all while the consumer is looking the other way.
They should have gone to priceline.com and named their own price. I bet they'd have been able to get a far better deal - and perhaps got to meet William Shatner!
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
With all the concern over fake/unjust ratings and reviews, I wonder if Google might release a contextual review/rating averaging engine.
By contextually searching blogs, review sites and news reports, one could have the most aggressive aggregate information available.
Combined with AdSense, it's incredible power.
Actually yeah, I did think of that, and it's still a stupid decision. You don't have to have an MBA from Harvard to know a stupid decision from a good one. Froogle is out there and will probably achieve market dominance in a couple of years. Pricegrabber already has market dominance in its sector, but in the long term it probably won't maintain it. Essentially this decision is centered around short-term gain, not long-term profitability. That's not a decision a company that is planning on staying around for awhile would make, unless they're planning on taking on Google, or being acquired by someone else.
Think of it this way. You've decided you're going to bet your house on a car race that's going to happen in two years. You have enough money to buy a really nice car that's almost as fast as your opponents car. Then again, your opponent is an expert mechanic and a great driver whereas you're just a great driver. It is likely that in the next two years, the car you bought will be aging and slower than it was when you bought it, and your opponents car is going to be much faster than it is now.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
To me, a name like PriceGrabber implies a focus on the needs of the shopper (saving money), rather than on their true goal of the needs of the seller (maximizing expenditures).
"WalletGrabber" would probably spook the herd, though.
Eventually we'll just be traded as consumers futures on the CME.
"10,000 auto buyers with >750 credit rating for January delivery"
who am I kidding, if they are shelling out $485 mil they plan on raping folks for everything they got in any way they can.
It's free. It has substantial (and probably overwhelming in the long term, Google-wise) competition. Companies can choose to have their items not listed there, and can pay money to sweeten things. Visitors can simply go away. How is this rape? Why does any merger/acquisition instantly turn into something Eeeeevil from the slashdot group-think perspective? I'm genuinely curious. This is a lot more benign than the "new product" news in pretty much every techie print magazine (almost universally regurgitated press releases, and in no way objective). Someone who's out there trying to find a thumbdrive for $0.05 cheaper than the next web site is already hoping for a too-good-to-be-true "find" on the web. Lack of critical thinking on the part of lazy consumers doesn't equate to rape of anybody.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Any idea if this new parent company is going to try and fix any of the glaring issues with disreputable vendors that have been discussed here in recent weeks?
I sense an "Ongoing bullshit senario" here. Years on the farm has taught me that anything with this much synergy in it just has to be agricultural grade fertiliser.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
They'll just use my credit report to filter search results for things I can actually afford!
Thankfully there's still http://nextag.com/.
I've always went to nextag, though that may be because they advertised with Google.
Anyone want to bet how long it takes PriceGrabber personnel to take the loot and run for the hills?
Sheesh, it's like the 90s all over again.
For me, they give me a range of acceptable prices. Then I go to the retailers I trust, your Amazons, J&Rs, Tar-jays, etc. Someone is usually hitting a good price.
Some of those obscure companies with the ultra low prices are slime. When shopping for a Fuji S7000, the retail was $699 and the majors were pricing at $599 or slightly lower. I found one that was $499. I bit. I ordered and received an email that they needed me to call to complete the order. That's when you have to add all the accessories or they won't complete. My response was something to the effect of "Eat me!"
They should have used priceline.com to get up to 50% off the purchase price! priceline.com! -- Yes, I did create this account just for this joke.
Now that would be a win, if Dun and Bradstreet's corporate information fed into Google's rankings.
Does this mean that I will only be entitled to one free PriceGrabber.com search per year now? Of course, I would imagine for a low $24.95 per month, I might be entitled to as many searches as I want, so long as my account remains paid. Or for $5.00 more, maybe I can even get the "Total Review" number, to see how many people have left positive or negative feedback of the various suppliers.
Homer no function beer well without.
There are many comparison shopping sites that do automatic price detection, all of them (including PG itself) developed and marketed for a fraction of the $0.5B acquisition cost. Personally, I prefer the little-known Dulance, http://dulance.com/.
:-)
A good test for Pricegrabber vs. Dulance that I have done this morning (an attempt to buy a miniPCI WLAN card):
atheros cm9
On PG, no results (but an ad from Neweb that really sells the thing - seems that whoever sells ads on PG does better matching than PG itself
On Dulance - very decent list of results (it did confuse euros with dollars once, though).
Yes Google will take over this space !! Then after that they will take over the world:)....Froogle is trying to do something that has been done for quite sometime and has no efficiency in doing so...there committment to this arena is limited and Google will only be a corporate Giant for so long...just like any other market !!
...and there was a time when people thought Netscape would rule forever.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
This will last a few years, then the majority of management will drift off to other companies with their bonuses, just before the company self destructs and sells what it has bought for one tenth what it paid for it.
Buying up internet companies makes no sence at all, as the internet provides easy oppurtunity for any company to start up and grow as long as they have the expertise and they serve their customers to the best of their abbilities. The profit comes when they sell out to a company with money (or at least easy access to large loans) and leave their company to be mismanaged in a quest for the profits that would have justified the purchase price but where never there.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen