Ask.com and PriceRunner announced they have reached an agreement to launch a UK shopping portal which is supposed to allow the local consumers to buy stuff straight from their computer. The juicy part is that the two companies plan to offer 200 different product categories which might represent one of the largest UK online shopping services at this time.

"We made the decision to bring PriceRunner.co.uk on board as we want to be able to offer our customers a comprehensive variety of information to any shopping search that they may have," Oliver Hill, VP for business development at Ask.com, said according to an article published on NMA.

"It is an excellent opportunity for us to promote and grow the level of traffic to our merchants. Ask.com provides a very comprehensive service to every user, and we are dedicated to expanding its shopping channel solution to offer the best product and price comparison available", Mattias Berg, MD of PriceRunner.co.uk said for the same source mentioned above.

The shopping portal is set to be released sometime next month, which is pretty obvious if we think that the holiday season is almost here. It was predicted that this holiday period will bring impressive revenues for the companies involved in online shopping, so Ask.com aims to attract the majority of UK customers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that UK represents one of the largest markets when it comes to online shopping and this is probably the main reason for Ask.com's moves.

However, some market researchers sustained that the companies which want to have a successful online holiday shopping season have to improve their technologies a lot because many of the services available at this time are pretty buggy and might force the consumers to look for other websites with more efficient features.