Idealo
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The company Idealo Internet GmbH is a price comparison service launched in Germany in 2000, and since bought by the Axel Springer AG publishing company. The headquarters are in Berlin, Germany. The Idealo website allows users to compare prices on a range of products from many shops.
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[edit] History
The company was founded by Martin Sinner, Dr. Albrecht von Sonntag, Christian Habermehl and others in 2000[1].
In July 2006 Idealo was taken over[2] by the majority from the media company Axel Springer which purchased 74.9% of Idealo Internet GmbH for an undisclosed sum. [3]
[edit] Technology
The Idealo sites use a combination of screen scraping retailers' websites and CSV files supplied by the retailers themselves to create a unique database of product offers that is filtered by real people. These prices are matched against a bespoke backend database of products and this matching process is carried out by using a fuzzy logic automated matching system as well as large teams of people also acting as a quality control filter.
[edit] Business Model
Idealo is a consumer review and price comparison website that is similar to other price comparison services in that it is financed by advertisers on traffic quantities as well as quality.
[edit] Main Differentiators from competition
Product offers displayed on the Idealo website are normally ordered by price where the lowest is shown at the top of any listing, however on product listing pages the products are ordered by price, popularity, user rating or test results. This is in contrast to alternative price comparison services such as Kelkoo and Shopping.com, which feature only paying retailers and allow them to bid for position in the rankings.
Each Idealo website also features a place for product reviews and shows a trend graph of each product costs over time.
