out-of-the-box shopping search engine

[mayamanako]

hi! do you know of any out-of-the-box shopping search engine that is either written in php or asp? wherein it will compare prices of any items, goods or services of any businesses, as one of our clients is asking about it. thnx for your help.

 

[BabyJeffy]

Never heard of something like that - but I can't imagine it would be difficult to build. I'm assuming your client will want to manually type in the prices and details for these goods or services - so then it just becomes a matter of searching a database... which is easy.

Cheers,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page @ Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/blog/

[/tt]

What is Javascript? FAQ216-6094

 

[mayamanako]

something like these:

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/

http://www.kelkoo.com/

 

[BabyJeffy]

Those are not "out of the box" anythings... those are full web applications that have been built specifically to aggregate data and allow it to be searchable.

You could approach those two companies and see if they want to sell their business... but I doubt they will be interested (and I expect your client wouldn't be interested).

...I'm assuming your client will want to manually type in the prices and details for these goods or services...

Cheers,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page @ Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/

http://www.codecouch.com/jeff/blog/

[/tt]

What is Javascript? FAQ216-6094

 

[Foamcow]

Kelkoo for one requires a business to sign up to be included in it's results.

It's probably not stupidly difficult to create some kind of system that will search product/price data - the difficulty is going to be in getting that product/price data and then getting it into your database.

If the businesses have to do that themsleves then they must see value in it.. i.e. your site must return enough qualified leads in order to make it worth their while.

If you, on the other hand, adopt some kind of screen scraping system then the problem is going to be in normalising the data - i.e getting the same info from each business and formatting it in the same way.

I'm sure you can see how it's not likely that an "out of the box" system is going to help there.

A quick Google for "Product price comparison PHP" turned up

http://www.pricetapestry.com/

Might be worth a look.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
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[Sheco]

What if you used

http://froogle.google.com

... you could specify in the URL the sort order, price range, brands, etc...