Price Comparison Website: How To Build It And Source The Data

80% of consumers compare prices online before deciding to purchase, and according to Transaction, 65% check out price comparison websites on their mobile phones while in-store.

So there’s no question of whether a price comparison website, or for that matter, product or service comparison website will draw traffic, but if you’re considering it, do your homework first, because even though there’s demand, the competition is fierce and just as with any other online business, it’s drawing in traffic that’s going to be your biggest challenge.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how to build a price comparison website so that it adds genuine value to visitors, how to build a data pipeline to make comparisons, and how to get people to come to your site.

Table of Contents

ABCs of Building A Price Comparison Website

Setting up the best deal comparison sites is the same as setting up any business website; and if you want to attract the best traffic to your site, there are certain things to consider.

Let’s get into the basic ABCs of building a business to compare prices across sites:

Step #1: Decide On Your Niche

The most important part of setting up online shopping rate comparison websites is to be focused, and target one specific audience; it is critical to choose a niche. You can always branch out later, but when you start, be laser targeted.

Don’t try to take on giants like Google Shopping or Shopzilla. Instead, find your niche – one that you’re already familiar with – and start small. Examples of smaller niche-centered price comparison websites are Gocdkeys that compares gaming products, Pricechecker which compares UK prices, and Farecompare that compares flight prices.

You should know that a Wiser survey revealed that most consumers typically compare prices of:

Electronics (90%)
Appliances (84%)
Food (78%)
Streaming devices (71%)
Clothing (71%)
Other (13% of which included vehicles, cleaning supplies, makeup and beauty products, vacations, decor, toys, entertainment)

Step #2: Build Your Data Pipeline

You don’t want to add data manually, so you’ll need smart ways of doing it.

There are three ways to get data for comparisons:

API connection: Integrate with a third-party platform through an API request and get updated data automatically. The limitation of this option is that your data is controlled by the owner.
Data service: Finding a data provider is an efficient way for one-time requests of a set of data. The downside to this option is that data that requires frequent updating can become costly.
Web scraping: Web scraping services use crawling bots to regularly gather data from target sites, instantly pushing accurate and updated information to your price comparison site so that you don’t need to depend on merchants to get the data you need.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is a way to extract data from websites. In terms of price comparison websites, you would need to extract various data from target websites to provide pricing and product comparison information on your website.

How Web Scraping Helps

Comparing pricing is not as easy as it may seem, but of course, since your site depends on this information as to its core service, the data you provide is everything. But difficulties do exist, such as:

Numerous kinds of data: To offer real value, price comparison websites should not only show prices, but also product specification details, customer reviews, and so on.
Clean data: To make price comparisons easy to view and understand, the data has to be structured and clear.
Integrating data from multiple sources: To tobe informative, the website must gather product data from as many marketplaces as possible.
Regularly updated data: Since most consumers don’t usually only check one price comparison site, your product data must be fresh and valid, and this requires frequent data updates.

Web scraping bypasses these challenges, making it an ideal way in which to source the data needed, but there’s another issue: building up a web scraping team is costly, especially for businesses that are just starting out. If you’re not proficient at programming, there is a solution: simply use a web scraping tool, such as Octoparse.

How Does Web Scraping Work?

A web scraping service such as Octoparse translates the complicated scriptwriting process to an easy-to-understand visual drag-and-click process, which enables non-technical people to build a data scraper as easily as browsing and clicking.

The Octoparse dashboard is simple to use, making web scraping for price comparison websites a breeze.

Web scraping does-it-for-you:

Get all kinds of data: Data visible on web pages can all be scraped by Octoparse, including tables, lists, articles, images, and more.
Get data cleaned automatically with the RegEx tool: Once you add steps through RegEx, Octoparse will automatically clean the data. (RedEx is a tool that helps you trim/replace/edit data in the way you want.)
Get data from all sources: Octoparse is a console for you to build scrapers, run scrapers, and get data from them. In addition, you can get data you scraped directly to your database through an API connection.
Schedule scraping for automatic updates: By scheduling, the scraper will run regularly, getting fresh data at the frequency required.

4 Simple Steps To Get Web Scraped Data With Octoparse

Step 1: Find your data sources

What websites do you want to source your data from?

Step 2: Build crawlers with Octoparse

Enter the URLs of the websites into Octoparse and start building your scrapers.

Step 3: Run your task with scheduled scraping

By scheduling your scrapes, get data updated automatically.

Step 4: Get the updated data through an API connection

Octoparse offers an API that can be used to integrate the scraped data into your website.

Octoparse makes web scraping for price comparison websites as easy as 123.

Takeaways

There is a demand for price comparison websites, and certain products are searched for more than others.
Decide on a very focused niche, especially to start because the competition is fierce.
Build your data pipeline with web scraping technology like Octoparse: Start a free trial.

Octoparse provides the method for you to get the data you need to run a price comparison website, and to do it without being a technical wizard. It can automatically source all the data from any website in the world and throw the data into your website without the need to do it manually.

To build an effective price comparison website without using a tool such as Octoparse to collect the data, would not be feasible.

Interested in building your price comparison website? Start a free trial with Octoparse and discover just how easy it would be.

Author
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Cecilia W

I am a content writer and a digital marketer in data science who believes in the power with which data can endow people’s businesses. I am working on writings that convey real values. If you have any feedback or ideas about web scraping and data analytics, talk to me at cecilia@octoparse.com.