Price comparison website?

[cluckcluck]

Thinking about building a price comparison website for a very focused product category (although haven't decided yet)

The main ways I can see this making money is using affiliate payouts and possibly banner ads.

- Does anyone have experience with making or being involved with a site like this?
- How did Google like it (as there may be duplicate content, and non-unique content)?
- Did it actually make any/much money?

Cheers

[Altrezia]

I'm sure we could build it for you, though we haven't done anything exactly the same before.

Details in my profile

[boony]

My site (see profile) is a comparison site of sorts. I wrote the vast majority of the comparison code myself and would just warn you that if you intend to scrape the sites that you're comparing, just beware that it's quite a burden to keep the code up to date as they change their sites.

Feel free to get in touch if you want any tech advice, I've done a fair bit of this stuff now.

[Webber3]

cluckcluck said:

Thinking about building a price comparison website for a very focused product category (although haven't decided yet)

The main ways I can see this making money is using affiliate payouts and possibly banner ads.

- Does anyone have experience with making or being involved with a site like this?
- How did Google like it (as there may be duplicate content, and non-unique content)?
- Did it actually make any/much money?

Cheers

The 'Golden Age' for price comp sites came to an end about 3 years ago. If you search for best prices and deals today, Google prefers to show you just the big brands, which IMO is a step backwards. However if you want to go ahead with this you will first need to confirm that there is a good spread in prices for you product/products. If everyone sells the item at RRP without any price discount or variance in the package, your site won't be doing anything useful.

Check that there are enough merchants with affiliate programmes that sell your product/products. If you only have 2 merchants on the site then there's not a lot to compare. Also, if the biggest merchant with the best prices doesn't have an affiliate programme then your site will never be able to give people the best price.

You don't need to scrape sites to get prices. If the prices are fairly static you can use product feeds from the affiliate networks. Duplicate content from product feeds won't hurt you, but it won't help you either. Put some time in and do your own product descriptions.

Forget banner ads, you'll only make pennies from those and possibly lose a buyer when they leave your site.

[sa_20v]

Webber3 said:

The 'Golden Age' for price comp sites came to an end about 3 years ago.

Depends on the contracts you have.

[ehasler]

cluckcluck said:

Thinking about building a price comparison website for a very focused product category (although haven't decided yet)

The main ways I can see this making money is using affiliate payouts and possibly banner ads.

- Does anyone have experience with making or being involved with a site like this?
- How did Google like it (as there may be duplicate content, and non-unique content)?
- Did it actually make any/much money?

Cheers

I've been doing this for the last 9 months or so (see profile for site) using affiliate links, but I've decided to keep the site clean and not have any banner ads.

For your second question, see here... http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

- Did it actually make any/much money? - Not yet, but this time next year Rodney...

Getting the prices is easy, as usually sites with an affiliate program will provide a datafeed (although you need to keep an eye on this, as they sometimes aren't correct). The hard bit is creating the unique content on each product page and adding value to the site, then of course getting it in front of people.