About Us

Founded in 2005, BlueSting is the second largest and fastest growing¹ Comparison Shopping service in South Africa!

Comparison Shopping, also known as a Price Comparison or a Shopping Search engine, allows visitors to find and compare products and prices from different online stores, all in one convenient place, and BlueSting is the South African innovator in online comparison shopping. Thousands of consumers use BlueSting technology to quickly obtain free and unbiased information about products and prices before making an informed purchase decision. Through continued innovation and consistent focus on providing the best comparison shopping experience in South Africa, BlueSting has established itself as the most trusted and effective online destination for savvy and informed shopping in our country.

How do we justify this claim:

• We are the most up-to-date Comparison Shopping website in South Africa. Our merchants products and prices are updated almost every day. We are also the only Comparison Shopping website that shows you the date we captured these prices on, so that you can be sure that the price you see, is the same price listed on the merchants website!
• We are the only website in South Africa that shows you the price history of products. We record and store every single price change, for every product, from every merchant. Knowing when to buy a product is often as lucrative as knowing when to buy stocks on the stock market, and we are the only place in the country where that data is available!
• We are NOT copy-cats who just steal ideas from other websites, or steal words or the interface to our website from the bigger international websites. We are true innovators, constantly looking at the process that buyers/shoppers undergo to find ways we can improve it, shorten it and make it more enjoyable and rewarding.
• We have also had to ban several websites² already from stealing our content, leading us to believe that we truly have something unique to bring to South African shoppers.
• We have made mistakes. Yes, everyone does and every company does too. But not everyone can learn from their mistakes and not everyone is willing to admit their mistakes. We have made mistakes in our Public Relations, in our code, in the design of our database and in our website interface. We have made mistakes online and offline. But, our code is getting better, our database and our website interface is getting better. Our relation to our competitors, shoppers and merchants is getting better. We still make mistakes, but we're still here and we're still learning ...

Our Goal: We are absolutely dedicated to producing THE MOST state-of-the-art comparison shopping experience for shoppers in South Africa.

Along with this goal, we constantly strive to send quality traffic to our merchants (often referred to as "qualified" traffic/leads/clicks), not quantity as we believe better quality traffic will result in more sales and less fees for the merchants (often referred to as the conversion rate, the rate at which a click is converted to a sale). Another focus area for us, is to attract only South African buyers to our website, or those visitors abroad interested in buying from South African merchants, and we are happy to say that 75% of our traffic and 99% of our clicks are local.

We have worked long and hard to bring this service to the South African public. Everything we do revolves around building the relationship, trust and interaction between the online shoppers and the online merchants of South Africa, and we hope you will enjoy the experience!

 

1) Source: SATopSites.com, our monthly growth percentage in February 2007 was SEVEN times larger than our largest rival!

2) Several eBay merchants and computer hardware review websites have copied our HTML code verbatim and placed it on their own websites, still linking to our images, and thus using bandwidth for their own purposes. We have banned these websites, and continue to look for other bandwidth thieves and copyright violators.