Q3. What happens with the new models such as price comparison sites?

Answer:

Price comparison sites is the service on Internet and allows individuals to see different lists of prices for specific products. Most price comparison services do not sell products themselves, but source prices from retailers from whom users can buy.
Price comparison sites typically do not charge users anything to use the site. Instead, they are monetized through payments from retailers who are listed on the site. Depending on the particular business model of the comparison shopping site, retailers will either pay a flat fee to be included on the site or pay a fee each time a user clicks through to the retailer web site or pay every time a user completes a specified action. (Wikipedia, 2009)

Thus, it is a B2B model. From this model of the price comparison sites namely http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/ and http://www.price.com/, the owner of them can make profits when users browse the items or use the comparison information. The revenue for these service providers grow continuously. Wikipedia (2009) shows in the UK these services made between £120m and £140m in revenue in 2005 and is growing at an annual rate of 30% to 50%.

The retailers who post products' information in these sites also gain benefits. The sites give a chance for the retailers to expose on Internet, in order that their products can be sold out with more chances.

Finally, the web users for the price comparison sites can find out the most reasonable price for the specific items.

As a result, the web users, the retailers and the sites' owners gain benefits in this price comparison sites.

Reference:

1. Wikipedia (2009). "Price Comparison Service". Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved Mar-10th-2009 from URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_comparison_service