idealo internet GmbH is a German

price comparison service A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare produ ...

launched in

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

in 2000, and since bought by the

Axel Springer AG Axel Springer SE () is a German digital and popular periodical publishing house which is the largest in Europe, with numerous multimedia news brands, such as ''Bild'', ''Die Welt'', and ''Fakt'' and more than 15,000 employees. It generated tot ...

publishing company. The headquarters are in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

. The idealo website allows users to compare prices on a range of products from hundreds of shops. The company invested 2011 an undisclosed amount of money in Sparheld International GmbH which operates various coupon portals across Europe, including Sparheld.de in Germany and Reduc.fr in France.

History

The company was founded by Martin Sinner, Albrecht von Sonntag, Christian Habermehl and others in 2000, using €500,000 in

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

(of which €350,000 from

KfW The KfW, which together with its subsidiaries DEG, KfW IPEX-Bank and FuB forms the KfW Bankengruppe ("banking group"), is a German state-owned investment bank, investment and Development finance institution, development bank, based in Frankfurt ...

). In July 2006,

Axel Springer Axel Cäsar Springer (2 May 1912 – 22 September 1985) was a German publisher and founder of what is now Axel Springer SE, the largest media publishing firm in Europe. By the early 1960s his print titles dominated the West German daily press ma ...

bought a 74.9% majority interest in idealo internet GmbH for an undisclosed sum. Its 2012 revenues were €52,612,705.01.

Technology

The idealo sites use a combination of

screen scraping Data scraping is a technique where a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program. Description Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using data structures suited for automated processin ...

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 Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely ...

automated matching system as well as large teams of people also acting as a quality control filter.

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. Companies advertising their products on idealo track user traffic and clicks through tracking pixels. 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. Some other

comparison shopping website A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare produ ...

such as

Kelkoo Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999. In 2000 Kelkoo merged with Zoomit, Dondecomprar and Shopgenie. The company was bought by Yahoo! on 26 March, 2004. and was subsequently sold by Yahoo to Jamplant, a Briti ...

and Shopping.com may feature only paying retailers and allow them to bid for position in the rankings. Each idealo product page also features a place for product reviews and shows a trend graph of each product costs over time. In 2019, Idealo stated it struggles to compete with other services like

Google Shopping Google Shopping, formerly Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle, is a Google service created by Craig Nevill-Manning which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendor ...

Notes

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External links

idealo UK site

idealo France site

idealo Spain site

idealo Italy site
Comparison shopping websites Review websites