Price comparison site technology

[temi]

I have always fancied running a price comparison shopping website, does any one know where I can find the technology for this or does any of the big players in this field license their technology to small fries like me?

[Robster]

Doing a quick search, the only thing i could find was this:
http://www.scriptsearch.com/details/3287.html

wether its any good or not is another question

[temi]

Thanks for that, I will check it out to see if its any good.

[OldWelshGuy]

The technology is not so much the problem, it is getting the data feeds from the suppliers that will be.

[temi]

Quite right OWG, but there is another model where you actually get various supplier to list their site and you either charge then when they make a sale or an annual fee for listing their site and promoting it (almost like a web directory of shops)
The web directory like model will suit me fine as I am not looking to get involved in too much details of stocking products, feeds etc.

[Robster]

It may be useful for you to know that on the DGM2 affiliate network, they provide data files of the catalogues of many of their affiliates in CSV format. This generally also includes image URLs.

An affiliate network would probably be an easy way of generating revenue anyway, so its probably worth looking into. You may find other networks offer the same.

This site of mine is almost entirely generated using the data files mentioned above:
http://www.allthegadgets.com/

[temi]

The right affiliate can certainly generate good revenue, I have one or two affiliate sites with feeds from Affiliate window, its not bad. Affiliate feed may as well be part of the new project I am looking to set up but the project itself is much larger than just an affiliate outlet, it will be basically a shopping site where merchants can add their product, because there will be many merchants with competing products the site will have a price comparison facility, I can then supplement product from the merchants with affiliate feeds, I am thinking of a similar site to this http://www.shopzilla.com/

I am currently negotiating with a company in US with the technology.... we will be finalising the negotiation next week, they still have not come back to me with the cost (this is making me thing they will be very expensive) I will update this thread on how I get on with after our conference call next week.

[Robster]

That sounds promising, what name do you have in mind for it?

[temi]

I think I will call it Haabaa Shopping or something like that, I have gone of the ideas of new names from my new ventures are its rather expensive registering all available domain extension if its a new name and also registering the name as a trademark, I will just run it from a sub domain I was grooming for Haabaa Shopping directory: http://www.shopping.haabaa.com/ the big boy has been doing the same thing, http://shopping.yahoo.co.uk/ for example.