Price Comparison site for Ireland

CptWillard

Eventually got so sick of the rip off and the lack of good comparative price info
decided to put together a price comparison site for Irish consumers some time ago ( similar to pricerunner.co.uk and the like ).Demo site is up and running (some mobile phones )at http://www.bestprice.ie .Still needs lots of work and of course the actual parsing of pricelists and updating the db will need lots more of my limited time .
Interested to hear what people think of the idea/usefulness of such a site .

byte

Good idea, best of luck with the site.

silent

excelent idea and something that is indeed missing for the (very few) e-shops in ireland. when you start parsing shop's pricelists etc you should include european shops that ship without hassle to ireland too
have a look at www.geizhals.at (austrian/german) - personally I believe it's the best price comparison site for the german market and system wise it's an awesome piece of work and second to none (the site forces retailers that want to be included to have a pricelist available for their use that can be automatically parsed, plus of course charges click-through fees and is actually quite profitable - at least was about two-three years ago when I was looking a bit deeper into how it's run)

CptWillard

thanks -that looks like a well put together site and i will have a closer look .I will be defining a pricelist format for the site and hoping to get retailers to conform to it but will be flexible to begin with .Google are also doing something interesting at http://froogle.google.com/ if you have not already seen that .

goin'_to_the_PS

good idea, really need one

Hornet

Great idea!

Have a look at www.preistrend.de as well. I prefer preistrend.de to geizhals.at, but that is just a personal preference.

--Hornet

Bodan

Nice idea , but is there that many online shops in Ireland to compare prices . Unlike the Uk we dont have that many and i think alot off ppl use Uk sites since there cheaper and most of the goods here are sourced there . The main advantage about irish shops is that the goods would be delivered quickly . There are some exceptions like www.shop4memory.com and mediawrite.ie are 2 i know of , i hope you find more like these .Good luck

CptWillard

True that is a problem but i was planning to include those without an online presence too .It is also possible to include UK sites and others through affiliate arrangements .Biggest problem is convincing people to submit pricelists in the first place .Some are afraid they will not be the cheapest and are reluctant to submit .Technically there is a lot of manual overhead maintaining accurate
prices in the database and collating the data in all the major categories.Haven't seen a really good (read cheap) spidering tool either to gather price info on the web .A lot done more to do - needs more investment in time and dosh at this point .

gerrydublin

CptWillard wrote:

Eventually got so sick of the rip off and the lack of good comparative price info
decided to put together a price comparison site for Irish consumers some time ago ( similar to pricerunner.co.uk and the like ).Demo site is up and running (some mobile phones )at http://www.bestprice.ie .Still needs lots of work and of course the actual parsing of pricelists and updating the db will need lots more of my limited time .
Interested to hear what people think of the idea/usefulness of such a site .

Now that from February 2005, residential customers can choose whatever provider they wish for electricity,
I'm interested to know if there are any price comparisons available.

It would seem that the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER) or the Regulator for Energy in this country has little or nothing on their website. If only all regulators were as good as IFSRA :mad: . IFSRA undertake price comparisons in the car insurance industry, life insurance industry, day-to-day bank charges to name but a few.
How are people going to switch from ESB to Energia or Airtricity unless they can see a price comparison.

jesus_thats_gre

An excellent pro-active attitude!!

yop

Something about Energia and Chamber of Commerce members only??