Pronto.com launches with prices on 45 million products

Pronto.com, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp, has launched in beta with the claim of entering the market as the web’s most comprehensive comparison shopping engine. The destination site offers consumers the ability to compare prices for a reported 45 million products from 50,000 merchants.

According to IAC, its comparison search index includes five times more merchants than other comparison shopping sites. It has a larger index because it displays products from qualified merchants based on information it pulls from the web via patent-pending data-mining and artificial intelligence technology, which also serves to organize the product information for comparison.

By contrast, some other engines use direct data feeds from merchants to populate their comparison engines: essentially, limiting what’s in the index to paying advertisers. Pronto’s listings also include paid listings. The shopping engine derives its revenue by engaging retailers in performance-based relationships where they get increased exposure by bidding on highly targeted sponsored listings that run above and below organic results to drive more user purchases.

“Many top retailers advertise less than one-third of their inventory on leading comparison shopping sites and consumers pay the price for this lack of comprehensiveness,” says Dan Marriott, CEO of Pronto.com. “Most people don’t want to shop in a store where two thirds of the retail space is empty, so why would they do so on the web?”

Categories covered by Pronto.com range from consumer electronics to books/music/videos to pet products and more. Pronto crawls some 50,000 retail-oriented sites across those categories, if they meet criteria such as transacting in U.S. dollars and providing an integrated shopping cart.

A downloadable application called the Pronto Shopping Messenger allows users to receive alert notifications informing them of lower prices and alternative product selections available across the web, as they shop on Pronto.