How Shopping Comparison sites work ?

[cnaivel]

Hi,



I would like to understand how Shopping Comparison Sites Work.



Do they take product & price feeds from different merchants in a Standard Format. If yes, what's that format. On what basis they compare a product. As the same product merchant refer in different ways. What's the unique identifier in products (In electronics category, Music, Movies, Books, Travel, etc.)



Do they simply crawl the merchants website in real time. If yes, then how they organize the data in a standard format alongwith Product prices and specifications etc.



Or do these cos. maintain their own database of products and then take Only price & stock information from the merchant in a standard format and upload. If yes, then from where to take this product database. Is the Merchant Price / Stock information updated in real time



In a nutshell I would like to understand What are the Steps to build a Shopping Comparison Site from scratch. I can put in Development & Design Resources. Kindly advise



Regards

Naivel

[Maxafi]

They all work in different ways - some use crawlers, some use feeds, some take manual submissions. A couple use a combination of these.

The only real way of grouping the products together along with specs is to use a combination of manual administration and 'fuzzy logic'.

In a nutshell, you need a lot of people manually filtering and sorting products to get it completely accurate.

[Nats]

Hi Naivel,

The majority of product/price comparison portals take product feeds (A digital inventory of all the merchant products) in a XML or CSV file format. Using this product data, comparison portals can compare products based on popularity, A-Z merchants, price, and relevancy.

To distinguish the product, all products have a number of unique identifiers that can be passed within a product feed, including:

• Universal product code (Element pid) – a number which uniquely identifies the product
• Universal article number (Element upc) – Similar to pid – European standard
• Manufacture part number(Element ean) –similar to upc – assigned by the manufacture
• A number that uniquely identifies any product (Element mpn)
• Model number to be assigned to the product (Element isbn)
• Product name (Element modelno)
It is possible to crawl the merchant’s website in real time, however this has been found to be unreliable (downtime) and time consuming. The most reliable method of gaining product data is through the delivery of a product datafeed. Through the provision of a product specification (DTD) to merchant partners, datafeeds received are standardised for affiliate partners to utilise. This standardisation will allow you to integrate and organise the data as you need, ensuring you to develop a comparison portal that meets not only your requirements, but those of your users too.

Merchant partners can update their feeds on a regular basis; with the majority of our merchants updating their feeds every 24 hours. This ensures that all the relevant information is up to date for affiliate partners such as yourself. To ensure control and minimum downtime, all merchant feeds are stored on our servers, allowing you to schedule updates and requests as and when necessary.

I’m not sure if you are aware, but we recently launched our comparison platform called ShopWindow; which is a product comparison engine that can be completely re-skinned as your own. As we are an affiliate network at core, we have already established affiliate relationships with over 700 merchants and by adding their feeds into the offering, this provides affiliates a with combined product range of over 4 million products. An example of our "skeleton version" is at: ShopWindow.com | Online shopping and product comparison site, which will give you a base understanding of the core functionality.

Depending on your requirements, this may be a solution that will be of interest to you, for which I have included a brief overview of the offering below:

The ShopWindow toolset comprises of:

• ShopWindow API- A developer tool allowing direct access to our product database
• Client Software – A white label solution allowing you to upload and customize your own shop
• ShopWindow direct – Allowing you to drive traffic through to ShopWindow.com and earn commissions

I hope my post helped, and if you would like more information regarding ShopWindow Toolset, please feel free to contact me on my details below.

Kind Regards

Nathalie




Nathalie Pellegrini
New Business

nathalie.pellegrini@digitalwindow.com
Tel: 0844 573 0855
Mob: 07809 545074
Fax: 020 8858 2007
Digital Window Ltd

[dougs]

We have 6 people fulltime sorting out feeds/csv/scrape data and matching them

ASAP.co.uk : Compare and find the best deals on flights - cheapest airfaire worldwide from asap.co.uk we have not even sorted hoels yet and we have done about 3 man years work so far

Doug

[vishwalok-nath]

Hi Nathalie,

We need feeds in few categories. I have sent you a mail. Look forward to your reponse.

regards

Vishwalok