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  • Search-sites
       and ratings
       
       • A tale of two
           search-sites
       
       • An argument
          against balance
       
       • You can
           play, too

  • Some well-known
       dealers

  • Dealer strategies:
       a few examples

  • All those
       pretty logos

  • The fine print


  • Relevant reading

In the Brooklyn summer of 1999, the Mets and the Yankees are headed toward their leagues' championship series and DCD Advertising is planning a spin-off. Even as their Shopping Cart of America project is germinating, the agency creates a separate company at the same address. They call it Intercept Advertising and Marketing. (Later that year, the Yanks get their pennant but the Mets just miss.)

Intercept stays under the radar, with no website or telephone listing, and no entries in any of the local business directories. As DCD develops and nurtures ShopCartUSA, Intercept remains in the background. But in the summer of 2004, a few months after DCD's launch of DigitalSaver, Intercept enters our little Tale with a shopping comparison site of its own.

Chapter V:  A Familiar Approach

The new site is called DidUPrice, and it perfects the approach used by DigitalSaver. Instead of a non-Brooklyn mailing address, it shows none at all. In addition to fees from its paying affiliates, it collects on ads from Google. Like DigitalSaver it gives no distracting explanation of the 4-to-5-star ratings claimed for its dealers, and no link to extraneous dealer information or reviews. It is a model of efficiency, smoothly funneling buyers to sellers based purely on price and a dealer's paid nearness to the top of each list.

DidUPrice also echoes DigitalSaver's version of don't-call-us-we'll-call-you: "...we currently accept new merchants exclusively by invitation from our staff..."

Tens of thousands of online shoppers use comparison sites every day. The profits these sites generate have made them one of the most actively watched industries in business, with a combined market value in the billions of dollars.

In December of 2005, PriceGrabber.com was sold for $485 million, and as this article in Forbes explains, there are sure to be more to follow. It's no wonder that marketing firms see an opportunity to use the search-site venue, even on a smaller scale, to boost their clients' sales and their own revenues.

Our reservations about these sites, and the reason we are discussing them, is that most shoppers are unaware of their primary purpose. That is due in part to the calculated effort some sites' owners make to hide their identities in order, we believe, to disguise that purpose. We state it below, for those who wish to publish it in newspapers or books, or carve it on monuments, or spray-paint it on the walls of libraries and schools.

Footnotes

The newest characters in our Tale...