Setting Up Small Comparison Site. Easy?

[KirstyM]

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Greetings!

I've just had a run thorough my increasingly big domains to develop list and have found at least ten I'd forgotten about. Now, last year I bought a garden-related domain name which has a really high search volume during the summer months (and hee haw the rest of the year). So it seems I need to extract me digit from me dunny department.

It's a "compare" term, which sort of suggests I should be getting a bit of price comparison going on the site.

My other half is proficient enough to set up sites using feeds, and we can both understand the goings on of php at a simple level. What I was hoping someone could advise was the difficulty level involved in getting a wee price comparison site on the go.

A niche area seems an ideal opportunity to walk before we try to run with this kind of thing so any advice at all would be much appreciated!

[Donk]

Easyish as long as it's a small niche market and you don't have too many products.

You will have to create (or copy) a category structure and manually match each product to your structure. After that you will have to match all the products which are the same.

The sort of problem you will discover is for an identical small spade you might get the following.

Merchant => Product id => Product =>Category
Merchant a => 123 Small Spade =>Hand Tools
Merchant b => 456 Ladies Spade =>Garden Equipment
Merchant c => 789 Ladies Small Spade =>Garden Accessories

So first you would put them all in the same category of your own.

This may be done in bulk with php initially merge the three merchants categories into the new one you created.

Now create a look-up table which would look like

product_id,merchant,merchprodid,category_id, etc
1 a 123 1
1 b 456 1
1 c 789 1


Hope that helps

[PriceInspector]

if only it was that easy...if you intend on keeping the comparisons up to date on a daily basis and consider when products are deleted, refreshed or updated, then a good few months of database design is required.

Your biggest battle will be with the merchant feeds...

[Donk]

As I said it would be easy to handle if it were a niche market and the the number of individual products was not too great, a large database program would not be needed in fact if were niche enough it could be done manually.

There have been a few small datafeed programs advertised through this forum, eg convertafeed , affilistore, pagerank10, magic parser etc that could reasonably easily adapted to create a small niche site.

For instance if you wanted to create a niche site selling soccer shirts. You would probably have less than 3000 products with only a handful of merchants. Not an insurmountable task to organise in excell or with rudimentary php mysql skills.

I would agree that to compete with kelkoo, Price that or even possibly Price Inspector the amount of programing resouces required would be beyond the ability and/or pocket of many of the forum members.

[HarveyC]

I've managed it on a slightly larger (but still fairly small) scale with about 1,000 products and 4 merchants, using the excellent pricetapestry.

My biggest problem was the way in which all four merchants would name a price slightly differently, or use different categories etc.

Still, a few hundred quid's worth of custom coding and hours of product renaming and categorisation and I have a functional site