price comparison code

[Robs]

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For those that did ask, a single installation of our "affiliate" software is 5000 pounds, a very very big price jump from the pricetapestry scripts which for the money are excellent. However like for like i think you will probably find our tools do around 300 - 500 other tasks besides what the pricetapestry offers and to develop yourself would cost you much more to develop.

Do you do a buy now pay later, or stage payments?

Rob

[pricethat]

Would love to, though i think it would have to say as it is to be honest, it does what its supposed to do at a high end level of affiliate marketing/network data management, hence the price tag. I think it would kind of degrade it somehow with monthly payment schemes and whatever, especially to those who have paid up front for a very specific bit of software. Will see how things go over the next couple of months, if its not great then maybe we will offer stripped down version to rival dmorrisions pricetapestry but to be honest We already provide data management services to one network and are talking to another so i cant really seeing us needing to go that far.

I quite like dmorrissons script though, seems nice and easy for people to start getting their heads round it but am a little sceptical how php would ever be able to manage an real quantity of data processing. Also php scripts tend not to be so reliable for long processes via http (also not the best for memory consumption).

Having said that it is really superb for people that want to get started though i think anyone experienced in this side of the game would say that it really is just the start and certainly not the full solution. I think a lot after importing all the feeds will be dissapointed about the lack of great results because of the way merchants name their products that you cant even match products together very easily.

[Robs]

Forgive me for the flipsnt comment, I have been up most of the night editing feed files to make them more suitable for display, so believe me, I know where you are coming from.

The Kaon script is a bit too limiting in that regard, I know there are valid reasons for the structure he uses, but it is a pain. He will alter the structure, however with multiple merchant feed structures, IE, AW, TD etc, you need to make a judgement cal on which one you would be importing on a regular basis.

I might see if I can write some code to streamline this somewhat and try and get the feed into a more useable format, good luck to me I hear you all shout.

I will come back and have another look at Pricethat at a later date.

[lowndsy]

I agree with the limitations about this sort of script, but I'm not really using it as a price comparison script - more of a shopping site with product search facilities. Most products on the site I have in mind are only available from one merchant anyway - if the price comparison kicks in for any of them it's a bonus.

edit: I've just dropped my host an email asking if anything can be done at their end and straight away got a reply saying try it now... and now massive files load fine! Kudos to MeirHosting!

[John Jupp]

"if your planning to hit it big time then you need much more sophisticated tools with many more admin functions and remote 24 hour a day updating etc then your going to need to spend the money i guess. Add to that a lot of time, even with 5 people on the case we still do not have enough staff to completely run a "proper" price comparison site, all the code is there to do it, but you still need someone to manually press those buttons and build the categories."

As I am finding out! Lots to do and not enough hands to the pumps.

[boydie]

I am currently building a site using Kaon software, give me 5 days and I will let you know how it performs, warts and all.

I have also got Price Tapestry running side by side so its a good comparison.

I have contacted Pricethat, and got some costs, but I will wait for them to post their costs as I don't think its my place to post on their behalf.

Rob

Sig should show various sites, but I can't be bothered at the mo.

I also bought Kaon software but haven't got round to uploading the datafedds yet, how are you getting on Rob

[HeresJonny]

Hi

We have a number of "live" XML price comparison services that quite a few affiliates are using. The services currently include DVDs, CDs and Video Games with a service for electrical goods coming within the next week or so.

For an example, have a look at http://www.find-dvd.co.uk/.

Thare no up front charges at all for this. If you're interested please contact Jon Horne - email jhorne@medifusion.co.uk, also see thread http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=32077

Jon

[Entrep]

Hi there

I sent you an email, sounds pretty interesting.

Hi

We have a number of "live" XML price comparison services that quite a few affiliates are using. The services currently include DVDs, CDs and Video Games with a service for electrical goods coming within the next week or so.

For an example, have a look at http://www.find-dvd.co.uk/.

Thare no up front charges at all for this. If you're interested please contact Jon Horne - email jhorne@medifusion.co.uk, also see thread http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=32077

Jon

[shyguy0507]

I think as i'm new i'm going to go with price tapestry for game showcase for now at least

[pricethat]

Thought it would be an idea to bump this thread up, especially as we have had a number of pm's over the last week or two.

As most of you know from the posts above we develop high end data management software which as seperate could be used to run a price comparison type feature. When you are looking to price comparison and want to choose what software you should use or are still looking it is important that you approach the subjct with the right thought, rather than expecting to find something that will do it all for you. It won't happen, period.

Price comparison is about taking a number of identical products and listing their prices, sounds easy, but in reality it is not and you will spend either thousands of pounds learning that fact or the equivalent amount in your own labour. Of course the natural feeling is that your own labour is free and ok to start with, which is what takes people down the path of giving it a go.

To take you down the full price comparison path we would do well to look at pricerunner, dealtime (shoppng.com), nexttag, kelkoo etc. All of these companies employ a lot of people. Why would they need to employ a lot of people if there was software that would do all the work for them, the answer is quite blunt there, there is no software that will do the work for them, so they employ people to do the work computers cant.

Now lets look at the other side of the scale, there are people that do price comparison sites by hand, taking all the prices they know of items sold by affiliate programs and manually update their pages each day. This works but there is only so many products you could ever do by hand, my thoughts are less than a handful, sounds easy to pick a product and then go make a page but in reality you will spend more time researching what product there is enough merchants selling them to offer a proper price comparison and then comparing these items with all the other companies that sell them not offering an affiliate program. Then on top of that you have then make your pages, get traffic, whether thats by ppc or seo, both take time to go get it and cost and then after doing all of that you have to constantly check prices each day irrespective of whether you sold any or not. With this method working full time on it you are probably only able to run 5-10 products properly (i am talking serious, proper price comparison, constantly updated and of a quality nature, adjusting seo properly and ppc bids etc)

So we look for automated tools or software to do the task. You could opt for a 100 pound script just to see how you get on, but while it might save you time you havent lost the fact that you have a huge amount of labour still to be getting on with, sure the php website part of the software saves you having to make pages up but for the reality you still have to identify products you can sell enough of, you would of thought that you could use your own search engine to do this, do a search and you can see how many people sell it. WRONG! You will find that what you are looking for does not even come up because its solely keyword driven and the keywords dont exist in the products you are looking for 9/10. Even if they do not all of them are there and half the time its probably the cheapest one you need, so now you are in the world of editing all of your products to come up with keyword matches, still having to research items etc before you come to sell them and an awful lot of manual work, however its less than 100 quid so its going to make you happy, for a cost versus value then that 100 quid or less is going to save you so much time that you could probably support anything up to 50 products, doing it "properly", not half baked.

Now at this stage there is always going to be people that agree or disagree but for the sake of making sure we don't get into pedantic discussion everyone should be able to agree on the manual labour needed to support price comparison or any other type of affiliate marketing is directly proportional the software and tools you have designed for that specific purpose and how good they are.

Moving on we have the mid range scripts out there for around 500 quid or less, these might seem to offer more functions but in reality they do just as much as the 100 quid ones out there, for one they are too ugly and need further customisation to make them effective enough to "really" sell from and probably dont actually offer that much more time versus money savings as above, but using the ethos that they do it would only push the amount up by maybe an extra 5 or 10 products that you can actually price compare each day and keep it up over a sustained period of time.

Now at this stage you will be rearing to go and you will be there each day editing products adding descriptions and you can actually make money using these methods above, probably more than the average wage, but you have to keep it up and people suffer burn out. You would kid yourself if you think it gets any easier, you can forget about building up a brand with simple pricecomparison sites unless you know you are going to keep it up and do a good permanenet reliable site each time. Kelkoo can do it as you mostly find what you are looking for (or people are led to believe) but even most of their traffic comes from the permanent marketing they do. No single person can operate a price comparison site in this room on their own that they know is that good without permanent slogging away every day, and even then it will not cover half the products and services as pricerunner and the like.

Personally (and from experience) with the above i dont know that many that get past the 30 products mark with up to date spot on content which is what is need for the ppc game for price comparison and even if they dont have to be "perfect" to make money, it certainly helps with conversions which in turn makes money (the whole damn point of doing it).

So then we move on to what we do, we decided we want kelkoo, we want pricerunner and we know we are years away from it even now, but the one thing we do have now is the most versatile product data management tool around so that we dont have to mess around with php scripts that fail because some ninny like a merchant buts a line break in a description which then throws the feed out of sink, or inproper text qualifiers, ill placed commas in comma seperated files, handling files that were not available for update, remembering which files have and havent been updated. Rules for when to be alerted to problems.

We could go on forever. But when you want to go down the pricecomparison road you then get hit with hundreds and hundreds of little tiny issues that then consume your time, because you have put hundreds of pounds already into the project or hundreds of hours you continue to work on it to salvage your work from being made redundant.

So, to try and move to an end, our ethos was to use software in the place that we can use scripts/technology to replace human effort, thus allowing us to do more marketing and or work. You still have to do some work, you still have to do a lot of work to earn money, but the work versus profit ratio increases with it. Some affiliates might look at this in different ways, some might say its too much for me yet be quite happy to spend a 100 hours work getting over all the different bugs you get with datafeeds, then another 100 hours work learning how to reliably balance servers to update millions of products and still keep the http server running. Other affiliates may look at it as they would not need to do so much work manually for the same amount of profit which means they can go watch football more often, whilst others might think well if i dont have to do so much physical labour to support each product then i can support more and more products thus making more money.

No matter what the solution you choose you have to put a lot of physical labour into it, at the moment the amount of physical labour you have to put in is directly proportional to the software that is available. Obviously i have not looked around too much this last two months but from when i last really studied it, there is:

Pricetapestry (well presented, "starter kit")
Kaon Software (bit tacky in my mind but still)
And of course what we offer

Ours is probably more than 50 times more expensive than the cheapest rival but then we could probably allow you to run a proper pricecomparison site 100 times more efficiently than anything close to us. Seperately none of the nearest competitor software could support managing a 8 million record database with all the updating reporting and management needed to do this reliably and without tearing down your server all the time.

So, whilst there may be a little plugging in my post the majority of it was aimed at changing peoples thinking when it comes to "price comparison", it takes time and effort. The most important thing to remember (although it goes completely against human nature) is to not kid yourself that "this will do for now" or "we will see how it goes" you either do it, or you dont in this game as there are already hundreds of affiliates that ARE "doing it" and doing something half baked that adds little or no real value to the user gets nowhere, nowhere in terms of long term business that is.

So, there it is, i know it doesnt really add anything new into the fire but for new people, or the people desperate to try and set something up to actually think about what they are getting themselves into, for the gentleman that is fighting not to scrap what they have been doing for the last 5 months, its not a downfall or a sign of failure, it just wont work. Sometimes having a holiday and starting again after learning from your mistakes is better than fighting against the mistakes you already made (hell at philosophical rubbish).

Regards

Matt

Ps if there is spelling mistakes tuff, cant be bothered to check through it

[James Pass]

The problem with price comparasion tables on say 'personal loans' is that everyone persues the cheapest rate (not neccessairly the most suitable product to their requirements) this often leads to an extremely high decline rate.

Comparasion tables can be good traffic generators but not always the best way to drive sales.

[brussell78]

From what I've read there appears to be a distinctive progression when trying to create a price comparison site, and the information pricethat has provided is very informative.

Looks like I missed out on the cheaper tapestry offering then as their appears to have been a hike in pricing.....Still...what's a business without investment. I'm sure with a little work the software will have paid for itself in no time.

Next stage in the decision making is SEO or PPC. I guess that's dependant on how much traffic your site can bring in and what commission levels you can achieve....