Shopping.com is a

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 prod ...

owned by

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

and operates websites in USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Australia. Shopping.com started out with the name DealTime.com which still operates as a related, but otherwise separate website.

History

Shopping.com began as Papricom (DealTime.com), which was founded in

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

in 1998 by Dr. Nahum Sharfman and Amir Ashkenazi, the original business model was to create a downloadable client that would monitor changes in prices of products the user seeks to buy over time, notifying the user when the product price reached a predetermined level (hence the site's original name, DealTime). Originally targeting American consumers, the basic concept was quickly modified from a downloadable client to a purely web-based service, a concept the company has kept ever since. After recruiting a management team of high-ranking executives from other industries, DealTime underwent rapid expansion in 2000 including formation of a major alliance with media giant Bertelsmann, adding

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and Japanese versions of its original American-targeted website, and acquiring Digital Jones, a product advisory website. However, during 2000 and 2001 it became apparent that the operation was losing a significant amount of money and that massive changes were needed. Three rounds of layoffs done in 2001 and 2002 halved the workforce to some 150; the Japanese and German websites were scrapped in late 2001, as well as plans for an early IPO, and Digital Jones was shelved. Also, a growing percentage of the merchants being advertised on DealTime's website were forced to start paying for this service or become de-listed; some lucrative product categories became paying-merchants-only. In 2002, a new bidding system was introduced, in which the highest-bidding merchant got higher placement on the default price comparison results page (consumers could always sort by price or rating). All these changes enabled the company to become profitable for the first time in 2003. Under the leadership of its CEO, Daniel T. Ciporin, in April 2003, DealTime acquired the

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

-based consumer product review site

Epinions.com Epinions.com was a general consumer review site established in 1999. Epinions was acquired in 2003 by DealTime, later Shopping.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2005. Epinions users could access reviews about a variety of items. On 25 March 2014 ...

. In September 2003, the merged sites relaunched under the Shopping.com brand and web address which it had purchased from

Alta Vista AltaVista was a Web search engine established in 1995. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own sear ...

. The new name, as well as some offline (TV) advertisement and large online advertisement with partners such as

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

and other portals, enabled Shopping.com to become the 3rd most-visited consumer website, following

and

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

, for several months during 2004, and continuously in the top-10. Although Shopping.com remained an Israeli corporation with R&D facilities in Netanya, Israel, it had a strong US presence with its corporate headquarters first in New York City (1998–2003) and later in Brisbane, California. The company went finally public in October 2004, and was acquired by eBay in June 2005 for $21 per share in cash, or total consideration of approximately $634 million. It is currently a semi-autonomous division within eBay and still runs the www.shopping.com website. eBay and Shopping.com functionalities are slowly being merged, for example eBay's

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

payment system in SDC's offering to its advertising merchants. Shopping.com accepts CPC bidding. Merchants must pay a minimum of $100. Since 2005, the company has added French, Australian and once again a German version of its website. In April 2009, 61-year-old Nahum Sharfman was killed, along with his wife Nava, when their private plane crashed in Greece.Nahum Sharfman, Founder Of Shopping.com, Perishes In Plane Crash
Techcrunch, April 29, 2009; accessed on Aug 27, 2020

References

External links

* {{Ebaysites Comparison shopping websites Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq Internet properties established in 1998 Software companies of Israel 1998 establishments in Israel 2004 initial public offerings 2005 mergers and acquisitions

History

See also

References

External links