There is arguably little that is more fundamental to the e-commerce experience — and triply so with mobile shopping — than price comparisons. For products that lend themselves to precise comparisons (say, for example, a specific configuration of the same brand and the same model of a washing machine), there is little room for a merchant to hide padded margin and even less reason for a shopper to pay anything much beyond the lowest price.

That is what pushed such high interest and valuations in the top initial price comparison bots, including PriceGrabber and Shopzilla. But with no barrier to entry, price comparisons became a given, with every search engine, from Google to Apple’s mobile Siri, offering it at a click.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…