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by DeathArrow 917 days ago
>but in the end, it still wouldn't have mattered if I couldn't figure out how to acquire users

In EU there are many price comparison engines with millions or billions of products. I don't know how popular they are. Some monetize trough ads, some have partnership with stores and you can buy directly from the search results.

I generally search first on the local Amazon equivalent, if I don't like what I see, I search on a smaller store. If I still can't find or dislike the products or prices I search Google. If I am still not contended with the results, I will go search on comparison engines.

And I also have a browser extension called Pricy who polls the comparison engines, so once I land in a product page I know which store has the better price and what was the price history through last year.

Probably many people have similar patterns. I expect people in US to search Amazon first, if it's not a very niche product they are after.

I think you can have a better monetization proposal, if instead of just search you build a sales platform, so people can directly buy after searching, without hoping to various websites.

4 comments

Unfortunately many of these "comparison" websites have a businesses model built on affiliate fees.

It doesn't take much imagination to predict which products show up as "best" or "cheapest".

And the fairer ones have to keep playing cat and mouse with shops lowering pricing when they detect a scraper coming by. Or employ tricks to make their shipping seem free, lowering their overall price on the comparison platform.

> It doesn't take much imagination to predict which products show up as "best" or "cheapest".

Never seen a "best" outside of amazon, which does weird shit even without any affiliate fees. And "cheapest" is not really up to the site, unless they want to go under quite quickly.

Many if not all are like that. It's like everyone wants to take advantage of the lack of perfect information in the marketplace, as opposed to actually being helpful for consumers.
We were intentionally limiting the number of products and shops we were indexing due to opex. We needed to keep it low enough to provide ourselves with enough runway to keep things floating for longer.

pricerunner is another site which operates in a similar space. We had plans to build out the price tracking and a number of other features, so that we would appeal more to users who had your use cases. Sadly, we weren't getting enough traction. We did have regular users from the EU, but we simply couldn't seem to get in front of enough eyeballs for it to matter. At least at first, I expect that a large amount of your traffic to a new site like this has to be driven by Google, and we failed on that front as well. I'm not an SEO expert, so there were likely many things we did wrong or didn't even do which lead to this situation.

re: a sales platform, that's a pretty big challenge to take on, which would require massive investment up front. Not sure thats a viable route for most. We did have plans to address the "without hoping to various websites" problem, as we identified that as problematic for users very early on. The solution was relatively simple, but required more money to build out. We simply ran out of funds before we could get there.

<< We did have plans to address the "without hoping to various websites" problem, as we identified that as problematic for users very early on. The solution was relatively simple, but required more money to build out. We simply ran out of funds before we could get there. >>

What were your plans to solve this problem?

> In EU there are many price comparison engines with millions or billions of products. I don't know how popular they are.

Anecdotally, I guess, I'd say extremely popular. I never search for products anywhere else.

Yeah, here in Czechia I always look at https://www.heureka.cz/ first.
What do you consider the local Amazon variant? And which country?
Amazon has no direct presence in Switzerland, but you can order a fraction of its products from neighboring countries. Many products are not available, mainly because nobody wants to deal with customs once the product crosses the EU boarder.

Amazon itself never moved into Switzerland in the first place for many reasons (small market, unusual customs situation, relatively high salary for warehouse workers), and in the meantime the largest Swiss supermarket chain created an Amazon clone which became hugely popular pretty much immediately: Galaxus.ch

If you wouldn't have said that it's basically the Amazon in Switzerland, I'd have thought that this is some blogspam dropshipping site...
Amazon is a blogspam drop shipping site in Europe
There are alternatives throughout Europe. The Balkans have Emag, Benelux has bol.com. I think in both regions Amazon is less popular. I'm sure there are other examples.
The Netherlands has plenty of them. Tweakers.net is a price tracker for electronics and such (eg: computer parts, phones, laptops etc) and usually it's easier to find a shop cheaper than Amazon. I have some go to stores for my needs because their content is organised way better than Amazon. I also find some alternatives better than Amazon because they have free next day shipping, something that's not free on Amazon.
Emag in Romania. I hate it, they bought most of the competition, they did a lot of anticompetitive things, but it's really easy to buy from them.
At some point, a couple of years ago when they introduced marketplace, I actually thought they are aiming for an "exit" to Amazon. They really got the service part of e-commerce nailed down. Merchants quality is and always will be an issue, but it is the same as on Amazon.
hagglezon.com to compare Amazon variant prices
bol.com in the Netherlands