I can understand it will take time for retailers to come round to the idea. Are you offering any kind of ROI tracking to show merchants the benefits?
I little further down the line it may be worth getting some of your partners to give you a reference. I’ve found that retailers don’t buy from salesman, they buy because they don’t want their competitors to get ahead of them.

That being said, ‘perfect the product and it will sell itself’, is never a bad way to go.

it has .co.uk in the address

A lot of education is needed. Fear of the unknown is the biggest problem. One retailer once said: “I don’t want to be listed because my products aren’t the cheapest, but our service is good”.

I tried to convince him that good ratings would show this and would benefit him considerably. The fact that comparison shopping is not all about price is hard to use to convince people. But I’ll keep trying

And, yes, offering a free service breeds a similar sense of the unknown and a perception of poor quality. But, it worked for companies like Google, so I have faith.

I’m really glad to get some feedback from a site owner! Your comments are really interesting and apart from being intrigued about your product creation process (the colonel’s secret recipe), I’m now wondering how the South African merchants are reacting to the comparison sites that are popping up.

Given that for now it is a free service, what’s the take up like from merchants? Are they aware of the benefit of comparison services, and what sort of questions are they asking. Where I’m going with this is, what level of education is needed in the South African market. Do you feel that by not charging for the service, the retailer is not taking you seriously enough, and because of this they are not dedicating resources to developing quality feeds which makes what you’re trying to do- that much harder?

It’s a catch 22, but something that needs to be overcome at some stage?

So, I have no idea why I haven’t blogged about PriceCheck before – probably because it’s been keeping me so damn busy! Well, it’s out there and people are noticing….

I like the critique. Thanks, it’s very positive, and it seems we think the same way.

Some comments on your comments :

1. It’s all free at the moment – for users and retailers alike. We are analysing the various revenue models while we build up a critical mass of advertisers and products. There are so many models out there and the CPC one doesn’t always offer the greatest benefit to the retailer.

2. Kelkoo was a massive influence after my time in the UK and, nope, the Yahoo! API is not involved at all. It’d be very hard to match up their EAN and UPC codes here in SA.

3. The process for adding products is very complex (and my secret ), and it has to be to make PriceCheck a real comparison site. Others in SA (no names mentioned) just seem to dump products and show prices without genuine comparison.

4. Search results at the moment are not ordered on a bidding basis like other sites, and can always be sorted by price by the user – yes, this does add nice functionality when/if using PPC

5. Because of the free model at the moment, the AdSense will have to stay

6. Try the iPod search again – you’ll see the AdWords ad. (that’s how well targeted it is – lol)

Best wishes for the new blog Grant… Keep it up!!