The Price-Guide: Questions that should be frequently asked about on-line shopping guides

All shopping guides are not created equal. Why?
There are many reasons why The Price Guide UK is
the only choice when it comes to comparing prices:

Q: Are vendors required to pay a fee to appear in The Price-Guide UK?
Q: Does a vendor require a web site to be included in The Price-Guide UK?
Q: Does The Price-Guide allow shoppers to compare products offering similar features,
or are 'functionally equivalent'?
Q: What distinguishes The Price Guide UK's price comparison results from those of its competitors?
Q: Which other features distinguish The Price-Guide UK from its competitors?

Q: Are vendors required to pay a fee to appear in The Price-Guide UK?

A: No. The Price-Guide UK believes consumers should have access to unbiased reporting on products and prices. If a price guide restricts its product listings to those prepared to pay for its services, then it clearly isn't reflecting the best products at the lowest prices. Be aware! We only know one other price comparison site that will also display prices of non-paying suppliers. All other price comparison sites will only display the products of paying suppliers and, therefore, are heavily biased towards its paying customers, even though they tell you different.

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Q: Does a vendor require a web site to be included in The Price-Guide UK?

A: No. We make a point of including those vendors who aren't online, provided their product range is relevant and prices competitive. Our staff gathers product / pricing information from vendors' magazine ads, catalogues and daily faxes. The result is that we offer a far more balanced service than those price guides which rely solely on agent-gathered web site data.

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Q: Does The Price-Guide UK allow shoppers to compare products offering similar features, or are 'functionally equivalent'?

A: Yes. Although all shopping guides will display the prices of a specifically named product, they fail when it comes to displaying similarly-featured (or functionally equivalent) products. For example, let's say users are looking for an unbranded computer system with a Pentium IV processor. When using The Price-Guide UK, users need only enter this functional specification and every unbranded computer with a Pentium IV processor will be displayed, sorted by price. Alternatively, users may surf the various categories until a list of all computers with Pentium IV processors is found. There's money to be saved when searching in this manner, as poorly priced products are quickly exposed.

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Q: What distinguishes The Price Guide UK's price comparison results from those of its competitors?

A: Perhaps the most significant difference is that the competition tends to describe identical products in different ways, according to the format preferred by the retailer supplying the information. A brief example of this might be as follows:

Retailer 1: 15" Monitor, Philips, flat screen	£285
Retailer 2: Flat screen Monitor Philips, 15-inch	£295
Retailer 3: Philips 38cm flat screen Monitor	£300

Despite all three retailers providing separate descriptions for the same product, it is simply 'dumped' into the competition's search results. While this is much easier for the service provider concerned, it presents many problems for the user. The search results are difficult to read, as users have to read every product description to establish whether they are, in fact, reading about the same product. A true price comparison is therefore only possible with a great deal of effort.

This situation is aggravated if the search results are presented in alphabetical order. A typical search result example might read:

Retailer 1: 15" Monitor, Philips, flat screen	£285
Retailer 1: 17" Monitor, Philips, flat screen	£385
Retailer 5: Eizo Monitor, 15", flat screen	£309
Retailer 2: Flat screen Monitor Philips, 15-inch	£295
Retailer 6: Monitor, 15 inch, NEC	£159
Retailer 3: Philips 38cm flat screen Monitor	£300

This complicates matters for users wishing to establish the best-priced Philips monitor, especially in cases where search results contain hundreds of records. The Price Guide UK has written programs to re-write product descriptions to match existing descriptions in a specific format. A typical example might be:

15" Philips Monitor - flat screen 0.26

Retailer 1:	£285
Retailer 2:	£295
Retailer 3:	£300

The user can establish at a glance which retailer is the cheapest.

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Q: Which other features distinguish The Price-Guide UK from its competitors?

A: There are various features:

We maintain the largest database of comparative prices of computer components and consumer electronics available anywhere in the UK. Other shopping guides tend to offer somewhere between 10,000 - 200,000 price comparisons, but our database offers well in excess of 400,000 price comparisons from 350 retailers.
While most shopping guides solely use 'robots' to download information from vendors' web sites, we also gather information from magazine ads, catalogues and price lists forwarded by vendors, as well as from other publicly available sources. This saves having to page through countless PC magazines and web sites for the best prices!
All our prices are thoroughly examined, manually captured and indexed prior to entry, thus avoiding the type of problems associated with 'dumping' downloaded data from web sites directly onto web pages. This involves changing product descriptions into our preferred format, adding unique identifier codes and synchronising price / availability info with suppliers' databases.
While most other shopping guides rely solely on search strings to identify products (which often return many unwanted products), our directories allow users to search by specific categories. This is especially useful when uncertain, which search string to use. It could be likened to Yahoo, which is a search directory rather than a search engine.

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