Now many people use comparison websites. Consumers and investors often start their search for goods and services online by visiting a comparison website.
When looking for a certain item, what method do you often use? If you’re a savvy shopper, you don’t just grab the first thing that catches your eye. Instead, you shop around, visiting multiple stores to compare costs and analyze each product’s characteristics in minute detail. Naturally, you would like to maximize your return on investment.
It’s the same when you shop for goods and services online. Comparing pricing and offers from multiple vendors ensures you’ll get the lowest overall cost.
A comparison website is important in this situation because it allows customers to easily evaluate their options and pick the one that best suits their needs.
If you can keep your costs down, running a comparison website in your spare time can be quite successful; you might even be able to quit your day job.
What Is A Comparison Website?
A consumer is able to obtain and compare prices, quotes, and other pertinent data about a product or service from a variety of companies by using a platform known as a comparison website. This type of website may also be known as a price comparison website or a comparison shopping website, or it may simply be called a comparison website. Users are able to select a deal that meets their requirements as well as their preferences at the lowest possible cost in just a few clicks.
The number of people using the internet to conduct research on products and services before making a purchase decision has increased over the past few years, which has contributed to the rise in the popularity of comparison websites in the United Kingdom.
Travel-related goods and services (flights, hotels, and the like), Real Estate-related goods and services (home and lot/condos, and other properties for sale or rent), and Personal Finance-related goods and services are often the types of goods and services that Filipinos compare online (car insurance, credit cards, loans, etc.).
What Are The Functionalities Of A Comparison Website?
Listings
Pages that feature comparisons are also included in the listing. All of these features are essential for any good price comparison tool. In addition to the product’s name and price, the listing should also highlight its key qualities.
Filtering And Searching
Because the search bar is the most used function on any given website, it seems to reason that a customer trying to compare pricing on a specific item should be able to easily locate the entire product model.
People who aren’t looking for a single product but rather a set of requirements will find filters to be extremely helpful.
Rank And Review
Online shoppers rely heavily on customer reviews to help them decide which merchant to buy from. Consumer reviews from retailers whose products you’re comparing should be shown on your price comparison site.
Price Comparison
To create a price comparison website that reflects seasonal and periodic pricing shifts, it may be useful to include information on price history. Users can be notified of price drops by adding a price alert option beside pricing history.
How to Create a Successful Comparison website?
Thanks to the rise of eCommerce, comparison websites have become very popular. It is convenient and saves time to be able to check the price of a product on many e-commerce sites in one place. It’s a good business opportunity because affiliate sales and advertising bring in a lot of money. Starting an online site that compares prices is not easy. You need technical knowledge and a reliable way to get price information. We’ll show you the important steps for making a site that compares prices.
The Finding-Out Part
During the discovery phase, information about the project is gathered so that the website-building goals can be met. The results of this first step will make up the web development process’s basic architectural framework.
In addition, it will help you figure out which e-commerce platforms to use when making a website to compare products.
During this time, some of the best checklists are:
- Have a general idea of what the plan is.
- Find your favorite niche.
- Do customer research to make sure the idea is good.
- Set a firm end date.
- Make a structure and a model of it.
Partnering With Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is the main way that websites that compare prices make money. Most eCommerce sites have a way for you to become an affiliate and get a cut of the sales you bring them. To get started, you’ll need to sign up as a business partner on well-known eCommerce portals.
Once you are accepted as an affiliate partner, you will be given a referrer name that can be used on product links that go out from your price comparison site. Getting accepted as an affiliate partner is simple, so you shouldn’t worry about it.
How Things Are Set Up
This would be the hardest part of making a website that compares prices. You can set up the price comparison engine that will power your comparison portal in different ways. Some of them require very advanced technical skills, while others just need you to be good with technology. Here are the different ways you can put together a price comparison engine.
Build It From The Ground Up
If you want to make a price comparison engine with your own ideas, the best thing to do would be to hire a programmer. This would be an expensive choice. The benefit is that you don’t have to change the price comparison engines that are already out there.
Your tech might not be able to handle that. A custom price comparison engine will also take a fair amount of time to build. Building your own gives you a lot of flexibility, which is a big plus. If you want to start as soon as possible, you might want to think about some of the other options we’ll talk about below.
Compare Prices Scripts
If you don’t want to start from scratch with the price comparison engine. Don’t worry, there are ready-made scripts that will make it easy for you to make one. Most of these scripts are written in PHP, which makes it easy to add them to your web application. The only bad thing about it is that it might not meet all of your needs. Price tapestry is a great script that covers most of what a site that compares prices needs to do. You could also find some ready-made scripts for comparing prices here.
Plugins for WordPress
WordPress lets you do just about anything. WordPress is just as dynamic and flexible as it says it is. If you want to build your price comparison site on WordPress, you won’t be out of luck because there are some great plugins for this.
The best part is that you don’t need to know a lot about programming. Here are some great places to start: CompariPress, ComparePress and Compare theme which is available on Themeforest.
You could also look in the WordPress plugins directory for more price comparison plugins that fit your needs better.
Making And Testing
This is the core of the whole web development process, as it includes both coding and putting the results of the design and discovery phases into action. Most of the time, backend and frontend developers are in charge of this phase.
After the third phase is done, the result will be an MVP (Minimum viable product), which is a fully scaled, customer-focused website with all the features and functions listed in the prototype.
Website Launch & Maintenance
What should you do next now that you’ve made a great price comparison website that appeals to your target audience?
The next and last step will be to set up the website or app so that users can easily get to it. People think this step is just a formality, but it’s very important to the existence of your website or idea.
After a website goes live, keeping it up to date and making it better is like a never-ending process, so it needs a team of developers who can give it their full attention.
FAQs
How Does A Comparison Website Makes Money?
Price comparison websites can be used in a variety of ways to make money.
Affiliate or acquisition model for a price comparison site. Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, etc. are affiliate marketers. They pay up to 20% commission on sales referred by your website. If someone buys a product from a merchant through your website, you get a commission.
If you look closely at the above image, you can see how price comparison companies can make money by linking to other websites. Google Ads are used by the majority of price comparison websites.
As more people click on these advertisements, websites will start to make money from them. The brands are eager to place advertisements on websites that compare prices.
One of the sources of money for price comparison websites is brand advertising.
Where Do Comparison Sites Get Their Data?
There are a lot of ways to get information to compare. Price comparison sites can get information from stores directly. If a store wants to put its products on the website, it sends its list of products and prices through merchant feeds, which are then compared to the original database.
There are sites that give us data through APIs, so all we have to do is call the right endpoints to get the right data. Web scraping is another way to get data. This method focuses on turning unstructured data on the web into a structured format.
Feeds From Stores
Price comparison websites work with stores or companies to get information directly from the web feeds of retailers. Internet retailers make a lot of money from the traffic that comes from comparison shopping sites. If you can work out a deal with them, they might let you use their API. But if you want to use the API more frequently, you will have to pay more.
Either an API or FTP is set up by the merchant to send data directly.
Product Feeds From APIs Of Other Companies
Third-party APIs can also be used to get information about retail products. When a service is connected to a shopping cart, it can send e-commerce data via an API request. In this case, third-party services charge based on how much data they pull. These companies actively crawl the websites of the most popular retailers and put the information in a database that price comparison websites can use.
Web Scraping
When you’re just starting and don’t have a lot of money, options 1 and 2 might not be possible. In these situations, Web scraping is one of the most reliable and effective ways to get the product data you need from the sites you want.
What are the famous comparison sites?
These sites help online stores keep an eye on the competition and offer the best price to customers who want to save money. Here are some famous comparison sites.
- Google Shopping.
- Yahoo Shopping.
- PriceGrabber.
- BizRate.
- CamelCamelCamel.
- NexTag.
- Pronto.
- Become.
Why Do People Use Comparison Websites?
People mostly use price comparison websites because they let you find the best deal by looking at hundreds of quotes from different companies. There may be a much cheaper service you want to buy from a smaller or less well-known company.
Save Money
People use comparison websites because they make it easy to find the best deal by letting you look at hundreds of quotes from different stores. That can save you a lot of money when you buy something, of course. It’s possible that a smaller or less well-known company sells the same thing you want to buy for a much lower price.
Saves Time
Finding the best price for a product you want can take a lot of time. Price comparison shopping engines save you a lot of time because they put all the information you need in one place. Because of this, they are very useful. You can also get customer reviews right away, which can help you make better shopping decisions.
Many Options To Choose From
Another great thing about websites that compare prices is that you can shop at a lot of different stores. When you shop online, it’s very helpful to have options, which is exactly what this kind of site gives you.
Final Thought
Now that we’ve told you a lot about price comparison websites, you should have a good idea of how they work and what will help you make one. A simple, easy-to-use website that compares prices saves shoppers’ time and helps businesses make more money, making it a useful tool for the site’s owners.
So, if you’re ready to put your plan into action, take your time but don’t waste it. We’ve tried to tell you everything you need to know to move forward with the comparison website.