Besides Google Shopping? Not that I've heard of. I can't imagine retailers cooperating in sharing their pricing info, and don't tell anyone when they change their internal code so folks can easily screenscrape.
Google shopping has to be fed your data. What I mean by this is if you don't feed an api into google you don't show in the products section. Bing shopping is the same way. FWI they are both free comparison shopping engines. You have to pay to feed most of the others.
I think most people use the manufactures product code.
Certainly possible, but there's no off the shelf solution that does this.
You'd have to essentially create a script that would search all your competitors for their prices, much in the way that pricegrabber.com aggregates and meta-searches a bunch of different retail sites.
You could try using one of the various news/web aggregators out there, and plug in your competitor's sites, and the products, and maybe get a quick list of links you could run down. Although there's no real guarantee that it would work, as they're made for news or social media mainly, not retail comparisons.
Thats out of my realm.
Out of pure naïveté, but sometimes naïve answers provide clues.
How does Gurgle 'bot the net for search terms? Seems to me that a variant on their search "mechanism" is what you're looking for. I don't know how frequently Gurgle polls the net, but I remember several instances where I was looking for a recent post and it didn't show up for a day, and other instances where it showed up in only a few minutes.
I wonder if Gurgle might provide something like what you're looking for as a service, with a list of model numbers or specific items to seek, then compile a list or you, just as they do for any search term you enter... except it runs through an inputted list of search terms automatically.
Of course, they'd have to be careful not to step on the toes of their advertisers and favored sites.
I hope I'm not embarrassing myself too much.
On the other hand, you could just have a banner on every page saying something like, "We will meet or beat any other verified on-line sale price during their sale period."
Or even after the competition's sale period. I guess. Would bring in more and possibly repeat customers. I reckon.
Terry, "Naïvely looking at the problem from the outside," 230RN
I doubt google would share their secrets.
Google indexes normal pages based on there own algorithm bases on how popular the site is, how much new data appears on the site in a given time frame and a punch of other stuff.
Adds are expensive period, especially on search engines. I don't have the funds for that.
Plus like I said its more about watching the other people. I try and play fair with the prices. If manufacture X says this is the price than I'm fine with that. It preserves my margins. Its the others that play games.
One such offender has custom code on there site that shows lower prices to people from over seas. I guess they thought that they were being tricky. I caught them and dimmed them out.
Had some ask If i could match a price. I said sure send me a link. I look at the link it had the same price as my site. I emailed them back and said its the same. He said no its not. I asked him to take a screen shot and send it to me. Sure enough it was a lower price. I checked the URL he sent me. When it hit the site I got redirected.
Manufacture of the product was here in the US so they could never see the lower price, until I emailed it to the regional rep.
I'm sure they still do it, I just can't catch them.
I think I need an overseas proxy. Anyone know of a good cheep one?
