Originally Posted by
pricethat
Hello everyone, my first post so go gentle on me though i did want to make a comment on this subject, especially as we have been working on a price comparison service for the last two years.
Just to offer some people some pointers in that it does seem very simple to start a price comparison service when you look at it. It did to us when we did it, as skiled programmers we thought it would be a doddle, but it isnt. Sure you can bang a few mysql queries together to show feeds from a few merchants feeds but that certainly wont get anyone anywhere.
Before anyone even thinks of starting you really do need to know what your getting into. Two or three months of FULLTIME study would serve you more than trying to find a script that would do anything for you.
To make a price comparison site you need to realise that its a manual task, not an automatic one, you make automatic scripts to try and automise all that manual work you have to do. Even if you just concentrate on a small range such as electronics you will find that most of your time is just editing feeds manually as merchants do not provide data to you in a way that the price comparison site needs to work properly. You can try and specify but i promise you won get anywhere with it.
Two years later and we have have the backends in place for ours which probably is as good or if not better than kelkoo, pricerunner etc in terms of updating speed but that doesnt mean anything, we still need data and affiliate data on its own is NOT enough to run a price comparison site that someone wont laugh at. Pricerunner is probably the technically best of all of them but imagine the costs of trying to attract new customers, you wouldnt believe how much it costs to get sales people working to get the clients and then you have to provide traffic for them as well!!
Its a big task and not something that a simple php script will solve for you, theres no way that some of the php scripts like the ones mentioned above will scale large enough to operate a proper comparison site of any real benefit to the user and any seo effect from so many pages doesnt really work anymore because its already 1000 times duplicated content.
Our updater software just to import data, manage it, auto categorisation, editing etc etc cost us probably 30,000 pounds to develop in total plus my work for the last two years so a $500 script is not an expensive script as someone put it. But its not a full scale script, its a very basic import a feed type script, nothing that will run a full scale site with 8 million products for example and 8 million records at least you will need to run a good price comparison site.
A man called D morrison has created a script called pricetapestry which i think is very good for people that want to get started, php based, not very great for high end, mass data usage but it does give people a starting base to get started with price comparison but like i say, you have to be in for the long haul and dont kid yourself that any script or service will do anything near what you want or need to do to operate such a service.
For us we have done three of what we see as the four steps to a price comparison site
1: Universal data feed importer with 500 point error handling (YES!! 500 errors you will have to learn and find out about) Data handling, auto categorisation, data ruleset manager, character manipulation, find and replace, delete and merge facilities. interface, administrator accounts/admins
2: Advertiser login and reporting services, universal product data services, universal site scraping services to collect feeds for merchants that cant/wont provide them (dont presume big companies can even supply you with a feed to your specifications EVER)
3: Marketing tools, traffic managers to monitor incoming outgoing traffic to make sure purchased traffic is equal or less than the money/sales we are making from our own site for those purchased keywords (most traffic is bought, even kelkoo wouldnt have so many visitors just from seo alone)
Still to do
4: Make the comparison side on the front end of the site, that i imagine could take anything up to a year to make properly when you consider all that has to be done.
Anyway, i dont think i gave anyone any specifics of what you will be up against but i hope this was of some help to those considering what is needed to operate one. Even if you achieve it and make something better than kelkoo, pricerunner, dealtime its of no use to you unless you have a serious stuff of cash in your account to buy traffic to the site. A couple of thousand pounds of ppc money to buy traffic wont get you very far these days.
Hope that was a little food for thought
Regards
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