One thing I noticed and that I haven't been able to completely make sense of is why there aren't any big price comparison portals that serve the U.S. market.
I'm from Switzerland. One of the first use cases of the internet for me was to use the local price comparison site comparis.ch to get the best deals on services like health insurance or broadband packages. Comparis is a hugely popular website in Switzerland. And that's despite that fact that it's much wealthier compared to say, Germany (where idealo.de is the dominant price comparison portal).
My understanding is that there are a lot niche comparison websites, such as CamelCamelCamel for setting price alerts on Amazon. There are also aggregators for travel and other verticals. However, there appears to be no one particular dominant one-stop type of portal offering comparisons across all kinds of product and service categories like Comparis or Idealo.
I do understand that the United States has one of the highest average incomes worldwide and the people there are more willing to part with their money than consumers in other places. However, there must still be a sizable addressable market here, just like there is in Switzerland, which is also a wealthy country. And yet, no dominant price comparison portal has emerged yet. Why is that?