Web Review: www.pricescope.com

Leonid Tcharnyi, a PhD in Materials Science and a former IBM engineer, founded Pricescope.com in 2000. Ranked as number one in Google results for ‘Diamond Prices’, the website offers diamond prices and grading data from various vendors, based on advanced price comparison technology.

 

A quick search mechanism on the top left part of the homepage offers visitors a swift price comparison for stone profiles. This service is available for stones from both web vendors and local jewelers.

“Our observation shows that price is not the number one or even the number two factor,” says Tcharnyi in his article Markets’ Fragmentation is a Natural Process. “Simple estimation of the diamonds sold on- and off-line shows that the majority of consumers are still buying from local brick and mortar stores,” he adds.

Thus, although pricescope.com’s Local Jewelers feature is still at the beta stage, this system compares prices for stones, which can be inspected in bricks-and-mortar jewelry stores. These stores can be searched within 1 to 100 miles around a required U.S. state, city or zip code. I tried New York, N.Y. for the default stone search and received 92 results. Other, more specific searches, however, did not bring up any results and that was disappointing. Nonetheless, being an integral part of the light-speed evolution of Internet beta services is important, so it would be more appropriate to examine this feature in the long run.

Alexa ranks pricescope.com among the world's 16,000 most visited websites. As a consumer-centric “Advocate Site”, pricescope.com therefore offers its visitors additional complimentary services. The one I find most prominent is a cluster of customer and expert forums, in which appraisers, retailers and other industry members establish strong followings by helping visitors. For the consumer wishing to keep abreast of new market developments, this forum is a place to search for up-to-date information on many subjects.

ComScore Networks predicts that online consumer spending for November and December’s holiday season will rise 23%-26% from 2003. I think it’s safe to say that pricescope.com will certainly “be there” with its offer, earning a piece of the action.

IDEX Website Review is an objective evaluation, expressing clear and balanced opinions on retail diamond and jewelry websites. All articles published in this review are solely under IDEX’s editorial control and are not commercially influenced.

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