EXPERIAN, the credit-checking giant, has put its price-comparison website Pricegrabber up for sale less than three years after it paid almost $500m for the online firm.

It has appointed the American boutique advisory house Allen & Co to find buyers for Pricegrabber, which allows shoppers to compare the price of a vast range of goods from laptop computers to Barbie dolls and car tyres.

The move follows a downturn in fortunes for Experian, which last month announced plans to axe hundreds of jobs in Britain as it grapples with a slowdown in growth due to the scaling back of credit-card and mortgage lending at the big high-street banks.

The decision to put Pricegrabber on the block may raise a few eyebrows given that revenue growth at the shopping search engine was a rare positive among an otherwise disappointing recent set of results.

While revenues across Experian’s credit services fell 2% in the three months to December, underlying revenues at Pricegrabber rose 9%. The site claims to have 26m online visitors a month.

However, some industry experts expect Experian to struggle to recoup the $485m it paid in December 2005 to acquire the Los Angeles firm. At the time, comparison shopping sites were attracting huge interest from investors – at the beginning of 2005 Experian had bought Lowermybills.com for $330m, while eBay paid $620m to buy Shopping.com. Since then traffic acquisition costs – when users are attracted by bidding for key words on Google – have risen by 30%-50% for comparison websites, greatly eroding their profit margins.

The sale of Pricegrabber is also likely to coincide with Yahoo’s sale of Kelkoo, an online European shopping comparison site, which City sources say may lower the price Experian can achieve.

The value of websites that help consumers find cheaper utility suppliers and insurance has also tumbled. EW Scripps, the American media company, is preparing to take a hefty impairment charge on uSwitch, bought for £210m in 2006, as the number of consumers switching gas and electricity suppliers has tailed off.

Daily Mail and General Trust closed down smaller rival Simply Switch earlier this month. It paid £16.5m for the business only 18 months ago.

Pricegrabber was started in 1999 at the height of the internet boom by entrepreneur Kamran Pouzanjani with $1.5m from angel investors. Experian declined to comment.

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