Price Comparison Site.... Advice needed

Discussion in 'Programming' started by sugarman, Feb 24, 2009.

  1. #1
    Hello all,

    I have managed to pick up a really great domain that would be perfect for a price comparison style site. Say there are a hundred different niche items listed on the site. For each one...

    ... the lowest buy it new price is shown (crawled prices)
    ... a fair second hand price is price (average final sale price from eBay)

    The first part is proving tricky because a lot of the merchants that sell these items have really poor sites. So scraping is proving troublesome. Of course they have no feeds with pricing information. A couple of scraping companies have offered to provide parsed information for me for a penny a page, delivered as a csv file. I don't know that if that is a fair price. So that is the first challenge.

    For the second I was thinking that there must be a way to extract the final sale price for a keyword on eBay. Then it can be datetime stamped and stored in a local database. The aggregate of which can be used to determine the "fair price". I have had a look at the eBay API... and although I know a bit about programming, it is beyond me.

    So now you know the situation, I hope a few of you could help with some these questions.

    1. Can anyone recommend a content scraping tool?
    2. If not, is that penny a page offer a fair price?
    3. The eBay final price information, can it be captured?
    4. Can you recommend a good dev with experience of the eBay API?
    5. I have no language preference for the site at this time, what would you recommend?

    Many thanks in advance
     
    sugarman, Feb 24, 2009 IP