Experian Acquires Shopping Website

Credit reporting company Experian has acquired Los Angeles-based shopping-comparison service PriceGrabber.com for $485 million in cash.

PriceGrabber provides shopping and product information to more than 300 websites. Experian, which has its U.S. headquarters in Costa Mesa, is best known for its credit-data business but also operates LowerMyBills.com and Classes USA.com.

Experian, a subsidiary of GUS, a British retail and business services group, said all of PriceGrabber’s 140 employees would keep their jobs.

Neither PriceGrabber nor Experian executives were available for comment Wednesday.

Founded in 1999, privately held PriceGrabber is projecting sales of $60 million for 2005, a 50% increase over last year. The company collects fees from retailers for referring consumers to their websites.

The deal, which closed Monday, follows EBay Inc.’s acquisition in June of comparison site Shopping.com for about $620 million in cash.

A recent survey by Jupiter Research found that comparison sites were increasingly influencing shoppers.

The percentage of online consumers who considered the sites the most efficient way to find products and to help users decide on purchases increased by more than a third this year to 61%.

Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co., said sites such as PriceGrabber and Shopping.com were appealing acquisition targets in light of recent advertising trends.

“There’s continued migration of advertising dollars from offline to online,” Rashtchy said.

“If you are an offline-focused merchant or marketing company,” he added, “you want to have online assets because this migration is happening even faster now.”