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Case Study

MYSIMON

Founded in early 1998, mySimon (http://www.mysimon.com/) came late to the comparison shopping game. Comparison shopping agents–or shopping bots–such as Jango, Junglee, and B2C were already in existence and even they weren't the first. Anderson Consulting created a prototype of a shopping bot that searches for the best prices on CDs a few years before mySimon.

The other established comparison-shopping sites would recruit and charge merchants to be in their database of sites to shop. This limited the number of e-tailers that their bots could shop. In the comparison-shopping game, the more merchants in your database, the more price comparisons you can return to the shopper, and thus, the more valuable the service. mySimon's proprietary technology allowed it to add more merchants faster than any of its competitors–even those that were well established before mySimon came to town.

Within just over a year, mySimon was shopping more than a thousand merchants, comparing prices on tens of thousands of products, and became the number one destination site for comparison shopping. Today, mySimon's shopping service offers unbiased information on products and merchants, including price comparisons, product availability, and other merchant information. As a one-stop resource for smart shopping, mySimon helps shoppers find the best values on millions of products, saving visitors time and money.

mySimon also understood the concept of Information Packaging. They were one of the first shopping services to offer Shopping Guides to consumers starting out with Holiday Shopping Guides, moving on to Event Shopping Guides, then individual Product Category Guides. They were even the first to understand the power of providing their shopping service not only on a PC but also on Net appliances as well, such as the Palm Pilot VII. By downloading and installing the mySimon-to-Go software, shoppers can compare products and prices while they walk down the aisles of their favorite brick-and-mortar stores. They can comparison shop online and offline merchants, without leaving the store.

All this earned the attention of CNET (http://www.cnet.com/) which purchased mySimon in January of 2000 for $700 million. mySimon is continuing its development of innovative features that will further simplify and enhance the Web shopping experience.

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Last Update: November 17, 2020