Price Comparison Website Questions

Neko · #1 05-15-2007, 10:39 AM

I have an idea for a price comparison website (pcw) that would focus on a niche area that I don't believe currently has a good pcw. There is a lot of money being spent in this niche and prices often vary wildly from one online vendor to the next so I believe the potential to create a useful, profitable (from affiliate programs and maybe adsense) website is fairly good.

(For an example of the type of site I'd be interested in creating see http://www.addall.com/ a book price comparison engine.)

Couple questions:

1. Does anybody have any personal experience with price comparison sites? If you do, do you mind sharing your experience a bit?

2. Any links to where I can learn about setting up a website like this?

3. What are peoples opinions on the profitability of this type of website in general?

4. I would like to build the site myself mostly for the learning experience. My goal would be to spend anywhere from 1 to 15 hours a week on the site and have it up and running by the end of the year. I am a competent self taught programmer and have experience in a number of different languages but only a small amount of html/javascript/php experience (since I work as a computational scientist most of my experience is in C/C++/Fortran). With my goal in mind would this be foolish? Would I be much better off hiring someone to build the site myself?

Thanks for any info you can provide me!

dp13368 · #2 05-15-2007, 11:14 AM

I can't be of much help, but I solely use www.pricegrabber.com and it's probably the #1 I hear people speak of.

Neko · #3 05-15-2007, 11:43 AM

[ QUOTE ]
I can't be of much help, but I solely use www.pricegrabber.com and it's probably the #1 I hear people speak of.

[/ QUOTE ]

Pricegrabber is one of the biggest but it is not targeted at one segment. My site would be targeted at a niche market that places like pricegrabber/froogle etc. don't do a great job of covering.

BradleyT · #4 05-15-2007, 11:50 AM

It would be somewhat difficult without 2-4 years (full-time) experience in a web programming language. You're also going to need a good amount of SQL experience.

Neko · #5 05-15-2007, 12:13 PM

[ QUOTE ]
It would be somewhat difficult without 2-4 years (full-time) experience in a web programming language. You're also going to need a good amount of SQL experience.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well that's certainly discouraging! My understanding was that learning something like PHP/MySQL was relatively easy if you're already coming from a C/C++/Linux background. Do you mind elaborating a bit? I'm curious why you believe I would need so much experience before embarking on this development.

Thanks,
Neko

MrBlue · #6 05-15-2007, 12:21 PM

Doing javascript, html, and css is incredibly frustrating. You got cross browser issues, different versions of different browsers, I.E. bugs, and etc. I always feel like I'm wasting my precious time when I end up spending hours to get something to look exactly right in 7 different browsers.

BradleyT · #7 05-15-2007, 02:05 PM

I'm not saying you can't do it, just that without much web experience you're going to have a long road ahead of you.

How are you getting data into your database?
How are you handling payments?
How are you getting traffic to your website?
How are you handling client reporting?

BradleyT · #8 05-15-2007, 02:13 PM

Well if you're doing adsense or ads you can skip #2 and #4 but #1 is still huge. You'll want to accept standard file types (xml,csv,txt) and then you have the fun task of parsing each of those files to get the data inserted properly into your database. And you're going to have to emulate the same input format as the large sites so that people don't have to make a new XML file to submit data to your site.

At my last job I took our custom e-commerce database data and created XML files to feed froogle and shopping.com. The rest of the PPC shopping sites were out of luck as it was way too much work converting our data into their format and the traffic from those sites suck compared to google adwords.

elus2 · #9 05-15-2007, 02:20 PM

How are you going to generate revenues? Will you act as an affiliate for the sites you're comparing prices from?

Neko · #10 05-15-2007, 02:28 PM

Thanks for your help. Yeah, I would be generating revenue only through affiliate programs, and maybe adsense and not handling any of the actual transactions myself.

I (perhaps naively) thought that my users could enter the product/keywords into my site and I could somehow do a realtime search of the major sites in my niche and return the price from each of them. The user could then click on the link (including my affiliate info) wherever the cheapest price was and make the purchase there, hence generating me affiliate revenue.

If you look at the site anybook4less.com and search for "theory of poker" it returns all the prices for the theory of poker from amazon, barnes and noble, books a million etc. Are you telling me that all of that data is stored locally in a database on the anybook4less.com server?

If so, you're right that is a much bigger task than I had thought.

Thanks again for your help.