HOW TO PROGRAM A PRICE COMPARISON TOOL AND EARN MONEY WITH IT!

Lately we have been asked for numerous budgets to create an online price buyer, of different themes and in different ways, but of course, it is a booming sector, and we are not surprised.

Why are price buyers booming?: HOW TO PROGRAM A PRICE COMPARISON TOOL AND EARN MONEY WITH IT!

Pages like Trivago or Rastreator come to mind , and the truth is that especially when hiring a trip, a flight, a hotel, we have stopped searching among all the websites and have focused on comparing hotel prices according to the characteristics we are looking for, saving time and surely, money.

If you offer users to save time and money, you have earned them, that is why these platforms work so well, and it is surely the reason why the budgets they request us in this regard have increased significantly.

A website with a price comparison function is profitable (if done well, like everything else) both for the company and for the user, companies are given the opportunity to expand their online presence and attract traffic to their website and users They allow them to get a multitude of information in a couple of clicks.

In which sectors can I offer a price comparison?: HOW TO PROGRAM A PRICE COMPARISON TOOL AND EARN MONEY WITH IT!

Well, practically in all of them, but what we want is for your web project to compare prices online to be a success, right? If you choose to create an online price comparison site for the tourism sector, you probably won’t be able to compete with Trivago, unless you can afford to advertise on television and pay thousands of euros for Google Adwords campaigns.

With the same or very similar you will find if you opt for an insurance price comparison , there are already platforms such as Rastreator, Acierto.com or Kelisto.

It is not necessary to be a millionaire to be believed by your online price comparator , you need to have a good idea and know the market niches. Of course, it is not worth it if you intend to invest 500 euros to make your online price comparison tool , because no professional is going to do it for that money and the results will leave much to be desired, as if you try to create it yourself without having no idea of design, layout, web programming and databases .

Find a specific micro-niche about a product or service that people usually buy online, or at least, who usually check its prices, characteristics and opinions on the Internet, and if it is a micro-niche that you know, much better, more than anything because it will It’s time to talk to the companies that provide these products or services and it would be nice if you know a little about what their market is about, what type of customers they focus on and similar issues.

But what you are going to offer them is to appear in your search engine / online price comparator, and that they pay you X euros for each click they make from your website to theirs (normally, right now we are going to explain different ways of approaching a comparator online pricing) .

How to program an online price comparison?

We are talking about web programming of an online price comparator and not the design of an online price comparator , because the design can differ as much as you want, it is the aesthetic part of the web that will depend on your corporate colors, your target audience, of how clear or not the web usability criteria are, etc., and of course it is an important part of a price comparison, but what is really difficult is in its programming.

As always, at Rana Negra we totally discourage the use of predefined CMS such as WordPress, Prestashop etc., for the web development of a price comparison, and it is already difficult to have updated prices and characteristics of hundreds of products that are in other web pages, if we have to depend on installing plugins, modules, etc., that are updated, that do not interact well with other plugins, that the template is also outdated, etc., well that is already hell.

We are not going to get into too many technicalities now, we are just going to see how an online price comparator can be approached to search, find and display the different products or services, with their images, descriptions and prices . In addition, a comparator may not only compare by price, it can compare opinions online , or characteristics.

1. The simplest way in terms of programming, but more slave for the administrator who is going to run the web, is to do it manually, that is, from the control panel, manually enter prices, descriptions, etc. ., of each product to compare, and be aware of when prices change, to change them on your website. This is practically unfeasible in real life, and it is not a matter of having an outdated price comparison.
2. The normal thing is that this search for information is carried out automatically, and can be done in turn in several ways, if the suppliers that are going to appear in the search engine are aware that they are going to appear and want to increase their sales and online presence of this way, they provide a file with their products in formats such as XML or CSV. Of course, so that then import these files without problems and without making the project more expensive, these files must share a format, if each provider is going to pass them in a different way, web development will become more expensive or you will have to modify them by hand. to be able to import them. This import can be done by the web administrator or the provider itself.
3. Another way to make it automatic is through a web crawler, web crawling, screen scraping, web extraction, crawl spider … this process has a thousand names and more or less all of them talk about the same thing: extracting information from third-party websites.

Depending on what you tell us about where and how the information has to be extracted, we will recommend one way or another to do it, and your suppliers must be aware so that the process flows correctly, so you also have to know what they are going to provide us with. And why not.

And how do you make money with a price comparison?

The most common is that you charge for each click you take to third-party websites.

Other business models do not charge per click but per sale made, which is more difficult to find out with certainty and other businesses do not charge per click but rather for the advertising on the web, or they charge a fixed fee for appearing on the website. comparator.

If your online comparator website does not attract the attention of users, it is not positioned, it takes too long to load, etc., it will be difficult for you to earn money, it is obvious, right? Do not leave the web development of a price comparison in the hands of anyone , you will be wasting time and money.

What more functions can a price comparison website have? What kind of similar websites are there?

That users can filter their searches and search in free text fields , and not only browse the categories, it is a most useful improvement in usability, we recommend you add it to your online price comparator.

Also comparing user ratings is a booming feature, as we all check prices, ratings and opinions on the Internet.

So either supplementing a price comparator with user ratings , or having a website exclusively to be able to rate and comment on products and services, is a very good idea.

That users can save the comparisons made and receive notifications when one of the products interests them, drops in price, are also functions that complement this type of web applications very well .

There are also websites, especially that sell technology or services, that compare their own products, their characteristics, what is included and what is not, also showing the price. It is a good example of usability, at the click of a button to be able to compare, for example, two smartphone models, or two legal consulting services, for example.

On other websites we not only compare products, but also the units that are available in stock.

Similar to a price comparator, it is a meta-search engine, such as a search engine for train tickets, a search engine for scholarships, a search engine for flats for rent or a search engine for free paddle tennis courts , that is, websites in which information is extracted from third parties and are displayed to the user for their convenience.