If you sell a product online, you already know how shoppers can check out your prices and the quality of your customer service through sites like PriceGrabber, Shopzilla and Google Product Search.

But if you think it’s tough having your pricing so immediately transparent to every shopper online, things are now getting even tougher.

Now there are niche price comparison services which dig deeper into specific product and service areas.

For some time TripAdvisor has been pooling the experience of millions of travelers. So if you have some service problems with your hotel or resort, you can bet people are talking about it.

But what if you sell something very specific, like contact lenses? You’re not safe. Check out FindContactLenses.com.

You sell gas? Take a look at GasBuddy.com

How about strollers? You can’t get much more specific than that. It’s all there at FindStrollers.com

And to compare health insurance quotes, try Vimo.com

Each month more of these sites appear, giving consumers an extraordinary level of knowledge before they decide where they’re going to spend their money.

But what about when people go to the mall? Until now physical store owners may have enjoyed a measure of protection, simply because their customers are not sitting in front of their computers.

That’s changing too. If you see someone using a cell phone in your store, maybe he or she is logging into Text4Price.com, a mobile price comparison service.

As more and more comparison services begin to serve tighter and tighter niches, you have only two choice: offer the lowest price, or deliver a value that justifies a higher price.

The latter option is where the real business potential lies.

To survive absolute price transparency, you need to create a unique value around your product or service that justifies a higher price.