What is a price comparison site and how does it work?
Price comparison sites allow people to see and compare different lists of products and their prices. They source product information, including price and specifications, from selected retailers and provide a click through link so that visitors can then go on to buy the product from the retailer’s own site. As well as providing a good service for customers, these sites have the potential to earn site owners significant revenue through affiliate commission. All you need to do is focus on a specialism and import the information to your site and you will receive commission from the retailer whenever someone goes on to buy a product.
Create your own Price Comparison site
You can now set up your own price comparison site pretty easily. Recently, several developers have have released great WordPress themes and plugins that allow you to create your own price comparison site quickly and without much hassle. Here we list the best themes and plugins to do just that.
Compare and Compare+ by AWESEM Themes
Compare is developed by expert WordPress developers AWESEM Themes and is both easy to set up and easy to use. There are a huge number of features allowing you to implement all the possible functionalities you’ll want for product comparison. Compare is a well-built theme that will easily earn you affiliate commission from sites by integrating their product feeds. The theme is also great for customisation. See the Compare live preview.
Price $45
Compare+
Compare+ is a plugin developed by AWESEM Themes to use in conjunction with the Compare theme. The plugin is specially built for affiliates and publishers who want to deal with a large number of products and does so by automated XML / CSV affiliate product feeds. Compare+ provides an automated daily feed import, product and category mapping and more. See the Compare+ live preview.
Price $249 (3 licence package $599, 10 licence package $1490)
ComparisonPress by Premium Press
PremiumPress are known for developing specialist, professional themes and ComparisonPress is their only offering in the product comparison field. The theme has a clean design, is great for SEO and allows you to either add products manually or import them automatically. Amazon, eBay and Datafeedr are the main sources for affiliate products and there are options that allow you to cloak affiliate links, add ads and let visitors add products. See the ComparisonPress live demo.
Price $79.99
Price Compare by Templatic
Price Compare is a professional, out-of the box theme for those looking to showcase products from various sources on the web. It offers easy product feed manipulation and built in support for two data feeds (Amazon and CJ), and everything from the header to the footer on the homepage is customisable. The theme comes with several speciality custom widgets, including the ‘search price’ widget and the style and colour options panel, which allows you to customise your site quickly and easily. See the PriceCompare theme demo.
Price from $99
ComparePress Plugin
ComparePress is a self-contained plugin that can be installed quickly, giving your theme price comparison functionality in no time at all. The plugin allows you to add price comparisons to your site via WordPress widgets or shortcodes and is completely self-contained so won’t touch existing files or CSS. ComparePress offer both free modules and premium modules: premium modules are priced at a flat rate of £99 and give you full access to those modules’ features as well as 100% of their set commission rates (commission rates are based on a per sale basis: more details of how they work them out can be found on their website).
Price for premium modules £99
Price Tapestry
Price Tapestry is a PHP and MySQL price comparison script designed for working with affiliate product data feeds. It automatically recognises any parses any affiliate product feed file format. With the plugin for WordPress, you receive unlimited use, upgrades, full source code, unlimited support and you can keep 100% commission.
Price £180