Product comparison site

[ibscom]

Does anyone know what sort of back end a price comparison website will have and is there anything that is reletively inexpensive to setup available? We are looking into the possibility of setting up a site similar to confused.com but for another industry sector.

Also does anyone know what types of revenue streams you could look to make from this type of site?

[Astaroth]

Basically it is affiliate schemes... confused get between £40 and £100 per policy sold though them introducing customers.... if you register with tradedoubler then you can see the sorts of amounts that different companies are offering.

Of cause the thing to consider is the fact the likes of Quidco actually give the comission back to the customer (in full in their case but a £5 a year fee, or up to 75% of it fee free in the case of other similar sites).

How much it will cost depends very much on how the site is done and how above board it all is etc. Sticking with insurance aggregator sites like confused (as this is something that I was looking into not that long ago) there are generally 2 ways of obtaining the data, either using a web service (XML feed) or by "screen scraping" (though with other fixed price goods there is also the option of a "static" XML document as Froogle uses).

To gain credability a number of the insurance aggregators originally signed up a fair number of insurers but were also screen scraping others without their permission... cause this ment that they received no commission for the sales but saying they had 50 insurers on their books made a lot more people visit than if they could only say they had 15 (and in time many of the unauthorised listings became authorised).

The cost of setting up the site will depend very much on the complexity of the products (ie fixed price or varied subject to customer criteria), the method of getting the values and if you want to go the route of the insurance aggregators and include some companies without asking in which case you may also need to establish ways of getting round their security mechanisms like HIPS and IP blocking

[DuaneJackson]

Insightful response Astaroth - very useful.

ibscom - many price comparison sites have an API that you can hook into relatively inexpensively.

[ibscom]

Thanks to both of you for your responses.

What I am intending to do is above board. Basically I want to provide a service where I will search around for the best prices on products in a certain area. Therefore people will be able to select various search criteria on my site and it will search for the best deals based on this. I have looked into screen scraper software and found a few options. However I was wondering whether either of you guys would recomend any software in particular and a price range for this?