PriceGrabber was created in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, with only about $1.5 million in seed money. The company was able to raise a sizable amount of capital using the tools it had created for the general Internet marketplace of expert users and enthusiasts. By tracking exceptional deals from merchant crawls performed multiple times a day PriceGrabber was able to turn bubble-worthy goofs of other companies into seed money for a company built with a founder’s vision.PriceGrabber’s first feature retrieved prices from online retailers such as Buy.com or PC Mall and compared those prices against the prices charged by wholesale distributers Ingram Micro or TechData. Most online retailers simply drop-shipped from a wholesale distribution warehouse using automated fulfillment software. The business environment of the go-go 90s and the level of computing automation created pricing mistakes and mismatches throughout retail systems creating bargains at hundreds, if not thousands of dollars off regular prices.
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