Price Comparison Frontend development

Question

Hi,

I was wondering if any can shed some light on price comparison frontend development. In order to enhance the question my doubt resides mainly in the way that price comparison engines group stores selling same products into one single page eg: http://www.shopping.com/xPO-LG-42LD450

• Do they have a list of products and pictures as an internal scheme, where they crawl websites matching results and grouping them using a sql query by name, sku or similar?

• Do they crawl websites and group all results directly by using a sql query, with no predefined internal products database defined to match on?.

Any Help will be appreciated. Thank you so much.

Answer 1

Most price comparison sites will the following to get the products on their sites:

• First, any comparison site will have a place for merchants to give them a feed of their products. This is how these sites generally make money. The feed would contain essential product information including pictures and most importantly a Manufacturer's SKU to make it easy to group the products together. Without a SKU it's pretty tough to group things together apart from title matching, which can get quite flaky as every merchant names things slightly differently.

• They will generally crawl the larger sites that run affiliate services like Amazon.com in order to built a product database, but also generate revenue from the affiliate sales.

Once they have a variety of stores giving them their feeds, the stores will pay a per-click rate or similar and the comparison site will be able to display a variety of products for the consumer.