Other price comparison sites have deals with merchants and aggregate feeds using their own technology. This enables price comparison sites to monetize the products contained in the feeds by earning commissions on click through traffic. They provide their own API to the affiliate partner to show their products with specifications to the affiliate partner's website. Many of the popular shopping websites provide direct affiliation to the customer who wants to become affiliate partner. Affiliate networks aggregate data feeds from many merchants and provide them to the price comparison sites. Some third party businesses are providing consolidation of data feeds so that comparison sites do not have to import from many different merchants. This data is then imported by the comparison website. Merchants provide information electronically in a set format. This is done by a mixture of information extraction, fuzzy logic and human labour.Д¬omparison sites can also collect data through a data feed file. Retailers who want to list their products on the website then supply their own lists of products and prices, and these are matched against the original database. Price comparison sites can collect data directly from merchants. Streetprices, founded in 1997, has been a very early company in this space it invented price graphs and email alerts in 1998. Advertisers did not pay to be listed but paid for every click on a price. Users could then search for a product, and see a list of retailers and prices for that product. Through 19, various firms developed technology that searched retailers websites for prices and stored them in a central database. Later, through mergers and acquisitions, many services were consolidated.

Altogether, there were three broad categories of comparison shopping services. In the early development stage from 1995 to 2000, comparison shopping agents included not only price comparison but also rating and review services for online vendors and products. The European Commission began an investigation in 2010, which concluded in July 2017 with a в‚¬2.42 billion fine against the parent company Alphabet, and an order to change its practices within 90 days. Meanwhile, in developed markets, Google was accused of promoting Froogle and its replacement, the paid-placement-only Google Shopping, over competitors in its search results, driving down traffic to other sites and driving some out of business. It started in 2010 with CompareXpress in Singapore, and in the following years companies like Baoxian ( China), Jirnexu ( Malaysia), and AskHanuman ( Thailand) followed. Especially South-East Asia has been a place for many new comparison websites. ДЄround 2010, the price comparison websites found their way to emerging markets. In 2005, PriceGrabber was acquired by Experian for $485 million, negotiated by then-CEO and founder of the company, Kamran Pourzanjani, along with Tamim Mourad, in 1999. NexTag another entry into comparison shopping was named Times magazine world top 50 website in 2008, only to eventually close in 2018. Other early comparison shopping agents included and. Junglee, a Bay-area startup, also pioneered comparison shopping technology and was soon acquired by. Weld Netbot was acquired by the Excite portal in late 1997. The first commercial shopping agent, called Jango, was produced by Netbot, a Seattle startup company founded by University of Washington professors Oren Etzioni and Daniel S. The team, led by researcher Bruce Krulwich, created BargainFinder in 1995 as an experiment and published it on-line without advance warning to the e-commerce sites being compared.

The first widely recognized comparison-shopping agent was BargainFinder, developed by Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).

7 Niche players, fake test sites and fraud.

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