Selling on price comparison sites: how PriceRunner, Prisjakt and idealo affect your pricing

In the Nordics and much of Europe, price comparison sites are part of how people shop for anything with a model number. PriceRunner and Prisjakt are familiar names to many Nordic shoppers, and idealo plays a similar role in Germany and several other European markets. If your products are listed there, your prices are being compared in a sorted list whether you watch it or not. This article covers how comparison sites affect your pricing, what to decide before listing, and how to use them as a source of market information without letting them set your prices for you.

How comparison sites work for a retailer

The basic mechanics are similar across the main sites, although terms differ by site and country:

• Product feed. You supply a feed of your products with identifiers such as EAN or GTIN, price, stock status and delivery cost. The site matches your offers to its product pages.
• Offer list. Each product page lists the shops that sell it, typically with the lowest price prominent and the option to sort by price, delivery cost or shop rating.
• Paid traffic. Retailers usually pay for the visitors sent to their shop, commonly per click rather than as a commission on sales. Check each site's current merchant terms for your category and country, because rates and conditions vary.
• Shop reviews. Most sites show shop ratings next to the price, which shoppers use to decide between near-equal offers.

Google Shopping works differently in Europe. In the countries covered by Google's Comparison Shopping Services programme, Shopping ads are placed through a comparison shopping service of the merchant's choice, and Google Shopping itself acts as one of them, according to Google's Merchant Center help page on CSSs. For pricing purposes the effect is the same: your price appears next to competitors' prices for the same product.

What being listed does to your pricing

Price differences become visible

On your own site, a customer sees one price. On a comparison site, they see your price next to everyone else's. A 30 kr difference that nobody would notice when browsing shops separately is obvious in a sorted list.

Clicks cost money whether or not people buy

When you pay per click, an uncompetitive price is doubly expensive: shoppers who click through, see the price and leave cost you the click fee without producing a sale. Being listed at a price far above the cheapest offers can mean paying for traffic that was never likely to convert.

The cheapest offer is not always the one that wins

Shoppers look at delivery cost, delivery time, stock status and shop rating as well as price. A well-rated shop with stock and fast delivery can often win sales at a modest premium over an unknown shop that is a little cheaper. How much premium your customers accept is something to test, product group by product group.

Decide which products to list

Listing the whole catalogue is easy with a feed, but not always sensible when each click has a cost. Consider:

• List branded products where you are competitive on total price or have a clear advantage on stock or delivery.
• Think twice about products where you are consistently among the most expensive offers. You may pay for clicks that rarely convert.
• Check the margin after click costs on low-priced items. A fixed cost per click weighs more heavily on a 99 kr cable than on a 4,990 kr television.

A worked example: say a product earns you 60 kr gross margin per sale, each click costs 4 kr, and one in twenty clicks becomes an order. The click cost per order is 80 kr, so every sale through that channel loses 20 kr before any other costs. If a lower price would lift conversion to one in ten, the click cost per order falls to 40 kr, but the lower price also cuts the margin. Run this arithmetic for your main products before deciding where to compete. The margin calculator helps with the margin side.

Set a policy for comparison-site pricing

Comparison sites encourage a race to the cheapest position. A clear policy prevents that race from being run product by product in a hurry.

1. Choose a target position per product group. For example: within 2% of the cheapest in-stock offer for a small set of high-volume products, at the median for most others, and no attempt to compete on price for specialist items.
2. Set a floor. Include the click cost per expected order in your cost when calculating it. See minimum margin and price floors.
3. Keep one price across channels. Showing a lower price only to comparison-site visitors is possible on some platforms, but it creates confusion for returning customers and complicates any "was" price you later advertise.
4. Decide how to respond to moves. For more on this, see price matching strategy.

Using comparison sites as market data

Comparison sites are a convenient way to see the market at a glance, and many retailers use them to check prices. They are a useful reference, but treat them with some care as a primary data source:

• They summarise other shops' prices. The authoritative price is on the competitor's own product page. Comparison-site figures can lag behind a change, or reflect a feed that has not yet updated.
• They only show listed shops. A competitor that does not list on a given site is invisible there, even if your customers compare you with them.
• Matching can be imperfect. Variants, bundles and refurbished items sometimes appear under the same product.
• Counting them as competitors double-counts. If you include a comparison site's lowest price in your competitor set alongside the shops it lists, the cheapest shop is effectively counted twice.

The most reliable approach is to track competitors directly from their product URLs, and use comparison sites as a cross-check and as a view of where you appear in the list shoppers see. That is how Luska handles them: competitor prices are read daily from competitor product pages, while PriceRunner, Prisjakt, idealo and Google Shopping are shown as reference only and are not counted in the price index.

Selling across Europe

If you sell into several countries, each country is a separate comparison market. The set of competing shops, the leading comparison site, VAT rates, delivery expectations and price levels all differ. A sensible approach is to treat each country as its own competitor set, compare prices including local VAT, and set positioning per market rather than assuming one price works everywhere. The rules on advertising price reductions also apply per country; see the section on prior prices in Black Friday pricing strategy.

Frequently asked questions

Is it worth listing on price comparison sites?

For branded products where you can be competitive on total price, usually yes, as the sites reach shoppers who are close to buying. For products where you are rarely competitive, the click costs can outweigh the sales.

Do I have to be the cheapest to sell on PriceRunner or Prisjakt?

No. Shop rating, stock, delivery time and delivery cost all influence which offer shoppers choose. Being near the cheapest is often enough when the rest of the offer is strong.

Can I use comparison site prices instead of monitoring competitors?

As a quick check, yes. As the basis for pricing decisions, direct monitoring of competitors' own pages is more reliable, because it covers shops that are not listed and avoids feed delays.