Price Comparison Wordpress Plugin?

[Fruit_and_Veg]

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Wondering if anything like this exists for wordpress sites?

I know there are various comparison scripts that stand alone but in making my latest wordpress blog it would be magically unbelievably brilliant if there was a simple plugin I could add into each post that would then display updated price comparisons. I just add some code along with a search term and then the plugin grabs all matching products from my feeds and displays them with my aff code.

Maybe one of these comparison scripts could add such a plugin to bridge their script and a blog?

At the moment I'm making a widget for each product by hand at the relevant networks and pasting them in, which is a hassle and only works with widget friendly networks, plus not all merchants are 100% sorted on the widget front (old feeds, missing products, etc).

[HarveyC]

Hello thar,

Do you have Pricetapestry/Magicparser? It's a parser that allows you to parse feeds into a database.

I used pricetapestry + my own code to achieve pretty much exactly what you're talking about. You just paste a bit of code on your WP post (with a runPHP plugin enabled) and voila!

To see it in action, go to featuredbrands.co.uk - designer brands news & clothes Welcome to Featured Brands.co.uk & go to a product page.

[kcheung]

Not being very technical can I also find out more information on how to do this?

currently my skill is limited to an HTML table

[Fruit_and_Veg]

Harvey - tx for your help. I haven't used a comparison script before but I've got runphp and another rss to html parser running already and I'm always meaning to get around to building a comparison section for my sites.

So if I understand it correctly, Price Tapestry handles all the feeds and the search facility and spits out the search result as an rss feed which includes multiple merchants - then magic parser pulls that feed into a page and displays it how you want? And it can do this on the fly (or at least cache once per day)?

Looks good. I see it's £200 for the pair but they look as though they're done by the same company, is there a multi-buy offer?

[HarveyC]

Cool - bit wrong there but close

Magicparser is the script that takes the product feeds (XML, CSV or whatever) and puts it straight into your database - that way you can access them easily and quickly via simple PHP.

Pricetapestry is the scripts that manipulate the data in the database to do the actual price comparison - all search pages, product info pages etc - and even the admin panel - are pricetapestry.

It's actually £150 for the pair, as PT includes MP

Personally I wouldnt' have got very far with magicparser on it's own - pricetapestry is incredibly flexible + easy to edit, and support is top notch from David.

Getting it on a blog takes a bit of thinking, PM me if you do decide to use PT and I'll send along some advice

[TheBlogHouse]

Just a quick post in case you missed this in the new WordPress forum.

ComparePress is free Wordpress price comparison plugin and allows you to place a full SEO comparison system on ANY WordPress based site within 5 minutes of install. Having the comparison data as part of your WordPress site will inevitably keep your users on your site for longer and also hopefully earn you more being paid per sale via ComparePress than the standard text based ads. We have launched the plugin with a UK mobile phone price comparison module that compares over 1,000,000 mobile deals but also have both video game price comprison module due for release by May 1st.

To give it a whirl you can either download the plugin manually at WordPress.org or add it by searching for comparepress via your WordPress Plugins Admin area and follow the detailed instructions here to get it set up.

Oh I should also mention if you want to discuss getting your comparison site's data built into the system in order to target a whole new affiliate market then get in touch as we are open to new business relationships especially some USA based ones!

Cheers

[pintofmilk]

Are you planning on adding hotel comparison to Compare Press? sletoH.com could power this functionality. Please drop me a message.

Regards
Ben Jackson
www.sletoH.com
020 7183 7183 / 07887 604005

[bougatsa]

I think it depends on the kind of site you have. I use both Price Tapestry and Easy Content Units to add price comparison results in Wordpress sites. There's pros and cons in both approachs. Here's my thoughts:

Price Tapestry
Setup
Have Wordpress installed in your root folder. Install Price Tapestry (PT) in a /subfolder. Then once you've got things up and running all you're doing is adding product feeds from the Affiliate Networks to your PT install - simple backend in PT makes this easy. Then you paste a snippet of code in your Wordpress posts to show whatever you want - 1 exact product, group of products by keyword, brand, etc, etc.
Pros
- Great control over what's displayed in Wordpress posts (exact product, products containg keyword xyz, brand, category, etc)
- Full Price Comparison site available in subfolder if you want it
- legendary support from David Morison (best support anywhere bar none)
- suit webmasters who want to learn more
Cons
- learning curve
- having to update feeds yourself

Easy Content Units
Setup
Signup for an account. Add your merchants and affiliate codes. Create widgets and paste into Wordpress. There's a great option on the Pro version were you can use PHP code rather than Javascript which means all the content added is spidered.
Pros
- Easy to use interface
- No learning curve
- Don't have to touch product feeds
- Good backend stats
Cons
- Have to create widget for each post

That's the two options I'd recommend Fruit & Veg. Both are excellent and worth exploring further. PM me if you want more info.

Cheers
Bougatsa

[hobbsy]

Price Tapestry
Setup
Have Wordpress installed in your root folder. Install Price Tapestry (PT) in a /subfolder. Then once you've got things up and running all you're doing is adding product feeds from the Affiliate Networks to your PT install - simple backend in PT makes this easy. Then you paste a snippet of code in your Wordpress posts to show whatever you want - 1 exact product, group of products by keyword, brand, etc, etc.
Pros
- Great control over what's displayed in Wordpress posts (exact product, products containg keyword xyz, brand, category, etc)
- Full Price Comparison site available in subfolder if you want it
- legendary support from David Morison (best support anywhere bar none)
- suit webmasters who want to learn more
Cons
- learning curve
- having to update feeds yourself

You don't need to update the feeds yourself with Price Tapestry. It's very easy to set up a cron job to automatically grab the feed daily (or however often you require)

[tinkerbell339]

There is one Price Comparison plugin for Wordpress which seems to get overlooked, probably because it was original designed as a standalone product for creating comparison websites but now it does have a WP plugin. Datafeed Studio (www.datafeedstudio.com) allows import manually or automatically from a whole bunch of affiliate accounts like Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future, Buy.at, Commission Junction etc. I use it on 3 wordpress sites and I am very impressed. The price is also pretty reasonable compared to some at £79 at the moment, this allows you to use it on an infinite amount of domains. I for one, would recommend you give it a look.

[WebTechGlobal]

I'm considering adding this ability to Easy CSV Importer. It creates posts using data and I plan to add a widget to display affiliate products in the sidebar.

I would like to know the demand for comparison before I add the upgrade. I already have the best CSV Import tool for Wordpress so it wouldnt be hard. If someone is interested in my plugin doing this please let me know on my sales page Easy CSV Importer | WTG 2010

[TheBlogHouse]

Just to say we have launched the first site powered by the new ComparePress Video Games price comparison module here Games Prices

If anyone wants to beta test the new module on their WordPress based site just get in touch.

[gary_ap]

we're currently using ECU here Best Prices | Slash Prices with our custom plugin to display best price on the sidebar of the individual post and on the best prices page

[ian-d]

On this same subject, I use Wordpress for a news site which contains a number of products. I don't want to use feeds or csv's from the networks, but have the code scrap the required product pages on the merchant sites for the latest prices and availability (as some of the merchants aren't affiliates).

Is there any such option available for this? Really need to get it sorted!

[mogmartin]

Hi Folks,

just a quick note to let anyone search for a wordpress price comparison plugin know that we've just launched: Wordpress Price Comparison Plugin - NOW AVAILABLE! - a fully featured price comparison script for wordpress 3.0.

Love to hear your comments?

MOGmartin