How does comparison websites work

This process can take some time — usually, at least a few hours, but sometimes several days. Email is the most common method.

If your site operates in a big market with numerous retailers, adding everything manually is a lot of effort. Similar to building a classifieds website , there are three main options for those who aim to create a price comparison website: create a niche comparison site from scratch with the help of a web development outsourcing company, use ready-made scripts, or go for a price comparison WordPress theme.

All three have their pros and cons. If you want to build a custom price comparison website but money is a concern, you might be interested in our article about how to raise money for your app. The most common business model for a price comparison website is affiliate marketing.

The links have a unique identifier so the vendor knows where customers come from. Depending on the agreement specifics, the fee can be paid for any customer following the link to the vendor or only for those customers who make a purchase after following the link. Some price comparison sites also make money with ads or by promoting specific vendors at the top of the page. However, these two models are less popular than affiliate marketing. While price comparison websites are quite complex and can be tricky, an experienced team of web developers can build such a website with few issues.

If you have more questions on the topic or want to receive a more precise cost estimate, contact us for clarifications and a quote. This website uses cookies to ensure you get best experience. Services Case Studies Company Blog. What is a price comparison website? CARE stands for: C — Clear A — Accurate R — Responsible E — Easy to use In short, this means that a price comparison tool, be it a website or a mobile app, should: Be clear on its policies, properly explaining its monetization model more on that below , how it works, and what part of the market it covers.

Provide accurate data in listings, i. Custom development Ready-made script WordPress themes Pros Completely unique All the features you need Only the features you need Can be easily integrated into a web app Cover most necessary features Many customizable themes No tech knowledge necessary Cheap and fast Cons Costly Takes time to develop Not easy to customize Requires technical knowledge Generic Tricky monetization policies Use when You want to make something unique to stand out from the crowd in a competitive niche.

You already have a core website and only need to add a price comparison engine. Contents 1. For example, comparison-providers Utility Bidder have a specialised business water division, offering firms reduced rates on their water supplies. It seems highly likely this trend will continue as providers aim to bolster their branding and become recognised as the go-to expert in specific fields.

As most people realise, price comparison engines work by gathering costs from multiple providers to present the best market rates for products and services — but just how do these sites grab this data?

Here are three common tools employed by price comparison providers to scour markets and display deals. For many internet-based retailers, price comparison engines provide substantial opportunities for new business and increased revenue, so partnerships between providers and the comparison sites are quite common and make good commercial sense. In the direct feed model, businesses grant comparison providers access to their Application Programming Interface API to directly deliver data from the source.

Also, merchants often provide data in multiple formats, which can cause parsing headaches on the part of the comparison service. After viewing a list of products based on their search term, shoppers can click straight through to an eCommerce store and make a purchase.

Doing your research about fees, minimum spend amounts, and contract periods will help inform your decision on which ones will work best for your store. Some CSEs require more technical knowledge than others, but most are simple to implement and super user friendly. If you want to reach consumers online, making it easy to compare your items with similar products will increase your visibility and mean a convenient shopping experience for potential buyers.

Google Shopping is particularly popular with eCommerce store owners as it offers free listings and is probably the largest, most well-known comparison shopping site—giving eCommerce business owners a higher chance of exposure to more shoppers. PayLessDeal is one of the most commonly used Australian price comparison websites, offering millions of products in innumerable categories.

GetPrice lists products in popular niches such as clothing, electronics, and books, with prices listed for businesses in specific cities such as Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.

BizRate is a super user-friendly price comparison site that also allows price alerts, offers a huge range of products, and hundreds of links to PDF user manuals for more technical devices. PriceGrabber is a great tool, especially for store owners and shoppers hoping to do research into a wide range of items.

One benefit of this site for retailers is that your store also gets listed on Yahoo Shopping. Although Amazon and Etsy are technically marketplaces and not price comparison sites, they work in a similar way, allowing people to search and compare products and pricing from a variety of sellers.

You might have heard of CamelCamelCamel , too, which is a price-tracking website for products mostly sold on Amazon. Price comparison websites make life really easy for customers by presenting a list of relevant products all at once. Obtaining the data to feed into your comparison website is likely to be your biggest challenge.

First, you need to source which suppliers you are going to compare before deciding which fields you are going to populate. There are two primary ways to feed the data into your website. The first is to get your data directly from each supplier. Quite often suppliers are reluctant to provide data feeds, in which case you will need to use a web scraping service. This is where sophisticated web-crawling software extracts the relevant data from each website.

Again, this is something we can arrange for you. Most comparison sites provide users with information free of charge and draw their revenue from affiliate sales, advertising opportunities or commission from suppliers. You need to carefully examine your monetising options. Alternatively, you will need to strike deals with each supplier for them to pay you commission per sale or lead. Monetisation is easy when you have a popular website which is proven to work.