COLLUSIONI.ST

Price.com is one of those ideas that you can't imagine not existing today.

The company was born in 1998 when my co-founder and I realized that we could completely change how people shopped online. If you wanted to comparison shop for a product before Price.com you'd need to track down the product at every vendor's website you knew of, figure out what shipping and taxes would cost, and whether or not the item was even in stock.

Price.com changed things in significant ways for consumers.

We built sophisticated web crawlers that matched up every known vendors' product prices, stock levels, and shipping costs with every other vendor. We were able show someone shopping for a specific laptop exactly what it cost, all things considered, in a single spot.

Price.com also changed the very market we were making tools for. Early on, vendors weren't exactly happy about us showing their prices compared to their competitors, especially since sorted prices from least to greatest. A lot of vendors would actually try to stop our spiders from seeing their prices.

Vendors started ditching their reluctance when they realized the opportunity that Price.com presented. We were able to prove that being included in our indexes allowed us to send them customers. At some point our problem of vendors thwarting our spiders was replaced with a much easier problem: what to do with all the data vendors wanted to send us.

Within a few years after Price.com launched there were a handful of competitors, most of which have either faded away or were absorbed by another competitor. Price.com, however, is still alive today.