Looking for an easy business idea to earn you great profits? Or maybe you already have an affiliate site, but you want to improve it and attract more users?
Great, because in this article we'll talk about price comparison websites:
- Why they are a great way to make money.
- How they work.
- How you can build one yourself.
What are Price Comparison Websites?
If you've ever booked a flight, chances are, you've encountered a travel aggregator – or in other words, a price comparison website. Sites like Skyscanner, Kayak, or Google Flights collect flight information from various airline companies to give you the best deals on a silver platter.
And it happens not only in the travel industry – the same goes for clothing, snowboards, electronic devices – even services like riding lessons and SPAs. It's pretty clear why people use such websites – to find the best prices or features.
How are Price Comparison Websites Profitable?
There are two main ways to earn money with a price comparison website: Affiliate marketing or the ads you run on the site.
Affiliate marketing means when you sign up to affiliate with a specific product. Every time someone buys the product using the link on your website, you get a cut from what the customer paid. Some subscription-based services even continue paying you a percentage for several months.
Some price comparison websites also run ads. The most popular way to do that is through Google AdSense.
How Much Can You Earn from Ads?
It depends on your niche, as some advertisers are ready to pay more than others. The most important factor, however, is the traffic – how many people can you attract to use your website?
How to Build a Price Comparison Website?
The price aggregator will make your website more useful for people. So how to start a price comparison website?
- First, find your niche. Will you review the best gaming computers, or will you help people buy Christmas gifts on a budget?
- Second, select the specific products or services you want to feature on your website – which websites could you collect data from?
- Third, monetize your website – set up affiliate programs with the products you'll be featuring on it – or register for a Google Adsense account if you want to run ads.
- Finally, choose your web scraping tool & proxies to start collecting the data.
How Does Price Comparison Website Work?
It's no secret that price comparison websites would be no good if they didn't provide you with the best deals in the market. But sales come and go, and prices change every day.
So, creating a price comparison website, you can't just collect product data once and forget about it. The data collection process for such sites is massive. It requires a constant stream of new information, so web scraping tools and proxy IP servers are crucial for its smooth functioning.
Web scraping tools help collect data automatically, without copying every single feature or price by hand. There are different types of scraping tools, some requiring very little technical knowledge. But we're more interested in proxies, indispensable when you need a lot of fresh data daily.
Web scraping tools will help you extract and update data automatically, but they will often meet many obstacles. For example, you might get a CAPTCHA, or your IP address might get banned from the website you're scraping. Why does it happen?
The websites you'll collect data from may lose sales following an unfavorable comparison. So they tend to protect their information from web scraping. Residential proxies can hide your IP address and help you overcome such bans. And don't worry, it's completely legal: many big companies use web scraping and proxies.
Which Proxy Should You Choose for Your Price Comparison Website?
Your proxies need to be fast – sometimes near real-time – they need to scale well and allow choosing from many locations. But testing proxies yourself is tedious, and you won't find reliable data online, so you are here.
If you're creating a travel aggregation site, we can recommend the best residential proxies for you here and now. In addition to evaluating the general proxy features, we also tested 8 major proxy providers for websites like Booking and TripAdvisor this year.
What's the result? According to our research, the best proxy providers for creating travel aggregation sites are:
- Shifter because of its great overall performance and a wide variety of locations.
- Bright Data also performed very well and has the best proxy management tools.
- Smartproxy offers similarly great performance as Bright Data but for a much lower price.
Besides the 3 market leaders, other great choices for you might be Soax, NetNut, and Proxy-Seller.
