Creating a price comparison site

**evanzo** · 13-04-05

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the domains i have is...

PricesCompared.co.uk

..I am looking to turn this into a price comparison site a la Pricerunner(although I have some unique ideas for features). Having assimilated 2 books on php in the last 2 weeks I feel confident enough to at least start the planning phase of this site. I am curious as to how the lack of a standard for datafeeds is dealt with?

This may seem like an overly ambitious start but having considered other options it seems the best as such sites offer the visitor a valuable service(thus ensuring return visits and doing some preselling for the merchant) and they are also more likely to lead to a profit when someone vists; as they don't require extranious content that distracts from their purpose.

**drivetowin** · 13-04-05

Originally posted by evanzo
I am curious as to how the lack of a standard for datafeeds is dealt with?

1. Sweat
2. Tears
3. Swear a lot
4. Bang your head against the wall
5. Swear some more
6. Bang a door against your head
7. Kick the cat
8. Kick the neighbour's cat
9. Bang the cat against your head
10. Contemplate your navel
11. Start again cos the merchant/network has added a new field into the middle of the file without telling you.

**evanzo** · 14-04-05

Originally posted by kbudden
1. Sweat
2. Tears
3. Swear a lot
4. Bang your head against the wall
5. Swear some more
6. Bang a door against your head
7. Kick the cat
8. Kick the neighbour's cat
9. Bang the cat against your head
10. Contemplate your navel
11. Start again cos the merchant/network has added a new field into the middle of the file without telling you.

I see. So there isn't some spiffy way to code around this problem?

**Paul Wright** · 14-04-05

Keith, I couldn't have put it better myself.

The lack of data feed standardisation seems to resonate amongst the forum members quite often. I believe the networks are working hard at resolving this issue but when you have so many merchants using different database structures (field names etc) i imagine it takes a while for them to catch on to the idea that it really is worth while making the changes if you want to make that feed a success.

It really shouldn't be that hard but who decides what goes and what stays? Also consider merchants that would like to offer feeds but don't quite conform to the traditional - name - product description - specs - image - price way of thinking.

There are a few programs out there that might help you. I've seen a few here on the forums that a quick search might find. Feed cleaners and php scripts that allow you to to dump .csv feeds into mysql databases, rename categories on the fly and import thousands of entries etc.

Hope this helps a bit.

Paul.

**graeme** · 14-04-05

Originally posted by Vivid Paul
Keith, I couldn't have put it better myself. The lack of data feed standardisation seems to resonate amongst the forum members quite often. I believe the networks are working hard at resolving this issue but when you have so many merchants using different database structures (field names etc) i imagine it takes a while for them to catch on to the idea that it really is worth while making the changes if you want to make that feed a success.

The product feed system we are about to launch at Paid On Results allows affiliates to create there own customised CSV or XML feeds. You can choose the fields of data you want - for example if a merchant has a Size field (in the case of fashion merchants) and your not interested in that for your site, then you can just remove the field.

You can then order the fields in whatever order you want, plus you can even name the fields yourself. And the feed can contain multiple merchants. This means merchants can offer as many fields of data they can, but affiliates can choose if they want it or not in their feed. Then even if the merchant then adds a new field to there feed at a later date, your feed won't update - unless you want it to.

Graeme

**drivetowin** · 14-04-05

Graeme

No disrespect to you and I am sure like many affiliates I am awaiting the launch of your new product feed system with keen anticipation but it does seem to have a gestation period longer than an Indian elephant.

We were told it would be ready for 1st December, then it was going to be early in the new year, we are now in the second quarter of 2005 and are still being told that it will be launching soon.

I know that Clarke and yourself are keen to get it right but I wonder if you are too deeply rooted in looking for perfection when for most of us a 95% solution would be an awful lot better than nothing.

**graeme** · 14-04-05

Originally posted by kbudden
We were told it would be ready for 1st December, then it was going to be early in the new year, we are now in the second quarter of 2005 and are still being told that it will be launching soon.

http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread...threadid=29472

You can start using it now if you want

**pricethat** · 14-04-05

With reference to your cunning plans, i appreciate that you have put much time to this subject but starting a product comparison site like kelkoo, pricerunner etc is not as easy as you may think.

You have no idea how hard it is to make, standardisation is not a real problem as far as i can see because you can just make different patterns to import data but the key problem is identifiers such as ean numbers, also for a lot of products they might not have eans, especially gadget sites and stuff like that as the products are chinese imports, novelties that are not big name items, also bundle packages and you name it, it just gets mental.

I am quite strict with my search facility in that i will not import the product unless it has an image, i remove duplicate deeplink urls and things and by the time i take every feed from every network i am left with only 300,000 products(excluding books and cds), not nearly enough to run a kelkoo or dealtime effort. (books and cds screw with search results so have to be seperated)

categorisation of products in my feeling will never be acheived, so you have to work on keyword search methods to extract the search results you want to compare products, but you cant easily extract a laptop from laptop case, because they both contain the same keyword, then you got model number xyz1 and xyz-1,

Not to put a damper on things but if you think you are going to make a decent price comparison site then you better be in for a good year or two long haul. Because thats how long its going to take you.

Then you will find you havent got nearly enough data and will then have to setup sales teams to go getting accounts etc, Its a long haul

**Matt Seigneur** · 14-04-05

how about doing a price comparison site in a really nichey area such as camping/fishing/hobbies, at least that way it would me more possible to dominate your niche and you'd be able to manage the site/datafeeds easier. Ok, there would be less products/pages but if you could find yourself a really profitable one that wouldn't matter (then repeat the above on another niche market)

if it got really popular you could then go to an online retailer (in your chosen niche) and offer to have their products on your site for a % of sales, or go to a [xyz-niche] affiliate program and ask for a higher % seen as you now dominate the industry!

**lowndsy** · 14-04-05

Us e subdomains - fishing.pricescompared - that way you can go niche, but do loads of different niches!

**evanzo** · 14-04-05

My thoughts are to only offer comparisons for the top selling products in a number of areas.

**pricethat** · 15-04-05

Yeah sure, niche would be great but could you tell me where your going to get enough data to do it, there isnt any data for fishing products out there to compare. (Not on affiliate schemes anyway) And even if there was one or two merchants that did offer it i hardly think 2 merchants is enough to run a comparison site

Try to do niche with any of the affiliate data out there and it just wont work because there is not enough data.

**jonno** · 10-05-05

Price That - nice site!! Did you use os-commerce to produce that?

**pricethat** · 10-05-05

errrm yup

and pricethat.co.uk and errmm globalbooks.de and errmm accessoriesdirect.co.uk and errm sterlingmobile.co.uk and oh gawwd my head hurts now, loads more, some nice, some nasty

**accelerator** · 11-05-05

Evanzo

If you're just starting out in programming, why don't you do what I did and just pick one network's feed to start with, and then you don't have to worry about standardisation. I'm using affiliatewindow.com 's feed and it has a pretty comprehensive range of merchants.

Also, don't be over ambitious in your initial plans.

All the best

accelerator