Internet giant Yahoo! has today announced the acquisition of price comparison site Kelkoo in a deal worth £318 million.
The purchase will enable Yahoo! to extend its online presence to include Kelkoo’s comparison shopping service and referral system, bolstering the company’s already successful Yahoo! Shopping directory of online stores.
Commenting on the deal, Terry Semel, chairman and chief executive officer of Yahoo! Inc, said: “Commerce has emerged as a key component of search, and the combination of web search, product search and comparison shopping will help further Yahoo!’s goal to create the most comprehensive and best user experience on the web globally.”
He added: “Kelkoo will add depth and breadth to Yahoo!’s integrated network of services for consumers, and adds another set of powerful tools for marketers seeking to reach them.”
Kelkoo’s internet shopping directory, Kelkoo.com, was founded in 2000. Within 2 years of launching, Kelkoo became Europe’s third largest e-commerce website, after Amazon and Ebay, and the largest e-commerce advertising platform both in the UK and Europe. The company now operates in nine European countries, receiving over 32 million unique users monthly, 12 million of which are in the UK. The website’s total number of visitors accounts for 10% of all European internet users.
Jean-Paul Edwards, head of media futures at Manning Gottlieb OMD, thinks the acquisition is a good move for Yahoo!. He said: “The Kelkoo system is very much geared up to provide specific results on model numbers and product names so advertisers and websites will pay a lot of money to be in that environment.”
He added: “The hits that are generated are red hot clicks that will lead customers direct to suppliers. There will be a decent size revenue stream coming from that and the deal will start paying for itself very quickly, it’s also a strategic move and essentially one in the eye for Google.”
The acquisition follows a deal struck earlier this year between Kelkoo and Yahoo!’s arch rival in search technologies, Google. The wide-ranging deal made Google’s AdSense website monetisation programme available on the search and content pages of Kelkoo’s European pages, a deal which may now be re-evaluated with Yahoo! at the helm.
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