Hard work = great rewards

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I do both and although my main site is a price comparison service I actually get more revenue from AdSense than I do from product sales!
It also takes a lot of effort and technical knowhow to maintain a large site like ours - I have to employ people to match up the products as each merchant has slightly different naming conventions. Without doing this the data would be a right mess and no one would come back as they wouldn't trust the information we are providing.

I'm also a programmer so write my own spiders as well as using the feeds but it still requires that last manual check to ensure the quality of the product information.

There is one distinct advantage in offering a service such as price comparison or reviews and that is that it is easiler to get into DMOZ and the other directories. Just having a product search without any "value add" means getting ignored by the directories in many cases.

I would say therefore that thinking about a service to go with the product data is the key. For example comparing all the energy ratings of washing machines so you can choose only washing machines with at least a "B" rating.
I'm looking at doing some niche sites like this soon as you can automate them as long as you can identify a key area in each merchant's feed that contains the specific information you want.

I hope that helps!

Chris.

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Sorry this post was meant to be a reply to "Product Search v Price Comparison" but I hit the "New Post" button by mistake - must be this hot weather!
Can someone move it please?