Why the ultimate e-commerce model - comparative shopping is seriously flawed

Pushing everyting 'e' to the max - skipping disparate single vendor web shops etc aside - the ultimate salesplace is a comparative shopping tool - information from different sources is aggregated to one single source of comparative information. So, when you go there and you need a hoover, you just punch in your criteria and you get the best offer. The 'best' often remains to be defined by you. But do we have many of these comparision shopping sites with considerable commercial success? The answer is no, with a few notable exceptions like computershopper.com and some consumer society sites. The reason? Is simple - this business model does not work, for these simple reasons: a) we may think that the 'perfect market' defined in microeconomics as - having uniform (comparable) goods on the supply side - equal amount of information on the demand side - no supplier or buyer can significantly influence price buy supply/purchasing dominance - transaction cost do not significantly influece (de-equalize) the opporunities of the parties This perfect market is simply NOT something that the suppliers want; b) the suppliers are well enough in a situation of market imperfections where they have some sort of direct access to the consumer and by having that they can make their sale. c) finally, whatever the qualitative criteria, mass-consumers tend to decide based on price, so the loosers are premium pricers with some extra bells and whistles even maybe at premium quality, the winners are cheap(er) and less that desiarable quality suppliers; d) it is simple to compare things based on price. Cash is a good uniform measure. At the same time, it is difficult if not impossible to present qualitative data in such a form so that it will satisfy the variety of would-be consumers in their comparative shopping; e) the actual cost of providing the comparative research is rather costly. It has to be financed, but the classic advertising model bends the consumer decision making towards the ones who have larger ads in premium places, thereby distracting the suppliers that do not afford advertising f) and there still remains the question, how objective is the research. If there are many of these sites, ok, but what is the guarantee that the reviews and comparisons are impartial? Is there a solution? Possibly yes, but there may be more than described here. The technological part can be solved so that the cost and sophistication of aggregating the data is reduced to minimum by aggreeing on publishing product data in a uniform format (agreed XML schemas), so the cost of maintaining the site is reduced to minimum. This is an issue of standardization and the pros and cons remind very much those discussed in here. Also the way reviews are compiled and published can be standardized so, that it will keep things objective enough for the purposes.