starting my own shopping comparison

I am new to the forum. I am wondering if there is any easy way to make a shopping comparison website using affiliate datafeeds. I am thinking about making a website targeted to music fans, and I want to be able to include different merchants so people can compare prices. I have found some programs but they are not suitable for what I am looking for.

 

As far as I know, this is not something you can easily get software for or find as a generic tool online. Shopping comparison sites are complex enough that they need to be custom built. But I have an idea for you.

Interestingly enough, I came by your post because we are building a comparison shopping site ourselves at www.miserlymonkey.com. We already have the search engine operational for our products and can easily extend it to include other people's products. (I'm guessing you'd want yours isolated from our stuff - which is not a problem).

We have a second site called www.blogskinny.com. At this site we have an RSS reader / parser and a database full of blogs. It is currently processing over a thousand feeds per day.

If you'd like to plug the two pieces together I think I could accomplish what you are looking for. Here's how it would work,

A) You would register all the feeds with the music stuff you want included in the comparison site at www.blogskinny.com using the AUTOMATIC BLOG feature. This would get all the feeds streaming into our database, which each being tagged to your username / password so we could find them.

B) We'd build you a custom search page that only included these elements in the engine...

Like I said, we're doing something very similar for our feeds from different merchants. It would be simply to extend it to give you what you're looking for.

PLEASE contact us at coop@miserlymonkey.com or post here to discuss further.

 

I was thinking about doing this myself recently.

I ran into the same problem - not surprisingly most places like Amazon or Play.com dont offer a RSS feed of their prices! The best way i could think of doing it was to screen-scrape which is a BIG undertaking. If you have the time and technical skills available to do it, it would probably be the easiest way of doing it.

 

got your pm, purdue

If I am correct you also post on the paypal merchant forum, +rep

I will visit your site

thanks

 

Thanks guys... Glad to get your posts. I am quite serious about this idea.. I feel like I have most of the pieces.

Your point about prices in the feed is extremely critical... Does nobody offer this? How does rsstalker get the price change info? Do they scrape it? If we couldn't solve that, we could use the free RSSTalker service for getting this info out of amazon and into an RSS feed. then load it from there into my search engine, there you have it.

My mind has been spinning on this all afternoon. I think I could bring this up fairly quickly.. Something like "build your own comparison shopping site from RSS feeds" would be the headline.. Actually, it's more like "build your own search engine from RSS feeds."

Let me know if you guys are interested. I have the know-how and the sites, but hate to spend time on things people don't want / need.

 

the_gallery - be sure to read our page on AUTOMATIC BLOGGING at blogskinny. This is how users enter the RSS feeds into our database so our spider can pull them. That's already operational. But based on this discussion, the piece I would add would be the indexing into a separate search engine for your use (only populated by the feeds you tag)... I don't think this will take too long to do. Let me know your thoughts

 

at the risk of answering my own question...

rsstalker must have an API with Amazon to do what they are doing. Does anyone know? Is that a publicly available API? Sure would be handy..

 

Well, there is a certain comparison script selling which I have come across which was selling for 450, but also I have found this

 

Thanks. I looked at that. But it is basically a rehash of the Shopping.com data via their API. Right?

My thought was to basically compete with the Shopping.com's of the world by

1) having niche shopping comparison sites (like the Music for Music Lovers idea)
2) having product fed directly from merchants into my comparison site

bad strategy?

 

forget the previous post. i just spent an hour on the amazon site and their API is possibly the easiest i've ever seen. i registered, downloaded some sample code, and have their complete database at my real-time disposal for searching and displaying the output on my site (with image links)... in simple terms, you put in the search on my page, the call is made to the amazon servers and they send the search results back to my page for display. it's like having their entire database without needing a database at all... sorry if this is obvious to others, but i REALLY like it.

i have about a thousand ideas about where to go with this. i'm off to play. i see integration into my store, my blog, my search engine, you name it. you can grab key words from the page that's loading and send it off to amazon for product suggestions that are appropriate to the content of the page to display in real time. VERY COOL.

if anyone would like to know more about this, let me know. it's EXTREMELY cool what they've done.

 

I bet there are alot of people who would be interested in this, I for one don't have as much knowledge about the back end programming for something like this. But I am good at searching I have actually found a website which can do all of this for you, complete with html, javascript etc..., templates, and xml integration. It is easy to sign up and they have 100's of affiliae data at your disposal. pm me for more info

cheers

 

Thanks. I did PM you for more info.

As for those "many people who would be interested," my gut says that's true. I read MANY posts about people having a few products and feeling like they need more in their sites / stores to attract and keep visitors from clicking away so fast. I am not sure how to get to them with this idea.

I am going to move forward with the belief that I will find them. I'm setting myself a personal goal of having an Amazon RSS feed publicly available at our site in 3 days. I have a few more design considerations to go through, but the tests from last night were all awesome.

 

For those following my posts, we're up to 3 merchants who are in for the SHOPPING COOP free comparison shopping site. Your only cost will be a small link (we're making the icon now) to the coop. We've pledged to spend $ on advertising for the site when we get to 20 merchants. Who else wants to join in?

Examples of our search engine coding can be found at my sites.

Both are on the left nav and use the same indexing and searching algorithms.

Thanks for your interest. Email at

 

No responses to my posts.. So I'm probably talking to myself here... But in case anyone cares, I did hit my personal goal for the Amazon API. I have it up and running on my blogs. If you'd like info on how to use this, let me know. I read in another forum here that someone achieved $1k per month via 30 sites, each with it's own niche and content-specific Amazon products. I'm pursuing the same goal myself. If anyone is interested in trying this as well, I'd give you the tools in return for feedback on how it works for you. Just PM me and we'll talk.

Thx