I think you may be winding us all up. If not then accept my apologies but surely if this is something you are thinking about, you would at least have a few ideas. No?
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UK letting agent offering a no frills, no fuss service.
Letting Agent

Well you will need to win over the trust from these companies. A well thought out business plan should do the trick.
It would probably cost an arm and leg just to get the web structure in place. So figure your figures and raise cash.


www.ratemytrade.co.uk

In every business to begin you need money and idea and willing. The idea should be real not abstract. For example I have an idea to make a comparison shopping engine and willing but don't have money.

Its good to see some opinions here, however without any dis-respect, neither of you have answered rprp's question.


Setting up a comparison site can be done through PHP's cURL, however this is something on very small basis and you would need to update everything pretty quick and as far as your idea is concerend.

To get retailers, you have to have good marketing strategy, You would have to convince the retailers of your page hits/ customer visits and you would have to invest some money on radio or tele media.

Why not search the web and see what price comparison sites are in uk, monitor the frequent changes on their sites and also speak to some IT geeks.

Best of Luck.

Hi there,

I am starting a business myself and find it very difficult when people comment on the validity of my business ideas. However I often find their comments engaging and relevant and so have used this feedback to shape some of the directions I have taken with my company. Hope my feedback to you can do the same.

Although I understand there will always be many competitors in the marketplace, my concern in starting up a business such as a price comparison website is that there are already some major players in the marketplace e.g. comparethemarket.com, gocompare.com, moneysupermarket.com.

Will your site be offering a different type of price comparison e.g. clothes, food etc? If so then there could definietly be some value for a consumer however if you are planning to take on the big boys I would make sure you take fully into consideration the scale of marketing budget and sales prowess that would be needed to compete.

Hope this is of some help.

The best way to start this kind of business is to let it evolve into the business model that competitors use, as in pay-per-click revenue and offer retail sites free spots on your newly devloped site for 12 month, after which once a reputation is built and traffic comes you will already have an established clientle and then can start charging for click.

In the meantime you could rely on ads as a revenue source.

I'm a web developer by profession and could point you in the right direction to getting such a project off the ground.

If you do succeed in development I'd be a willing participant, my site is http://www.essentialbeautystore.com drop me a line for more info.

Just a quick note, this is an extremely competitive market so to establish yourself with or above your rivals you'de have to give the visitors a new approach to price comparison sites, happy brainstorming and good luck!

Our company has been working in the comparison website development business for the past few years and we have seen that web software has come on leaps and bounds.
We have recently started to support and offer full customisation of Affilistore we comparison scripts with full seo rewrites for top search rankings.
This is indeed a cut and thrust marketplace but being a quality and reliable supplier makes you stand out from the crowd.
http://www.simplytoday.com/categoryblog/affilistore-the-best-free-website-comparison-scripts.html
Julie Gibbins - CEO
SimplyToday.com

I have been developing a price comparison for about a year and i can say is not easy. Is very easy to get the data from the retailers, but not easy at all to compare products from different sources. Although there are some available softwares on the market for price comparison, to my opinion they are not very good. The can support a small site with a limited number of products and retailers. On www.homeandgardenpricecheck.co.uk we currently feature 200.000 products and 100 retailers. No off the self software was adequate for this number of products.
If i can be of any help please feel free to contact me.

Simon

www.HomeandGardenPriceCheck.co.uk

I'm also interested to build price comparison website and have spent some weeks collecting information about this business. Yes I can say it is a profitable business but it is very difficult to start it up. first of all there are big players who dominate the market and it seems like almost impossible to compete them: Google, Yahoo, Shopping.com, kelkoo.com, pricerunner.com, pricegrabber.com, gocompare.com and so on.
Beside these big competitors there are also hundreds of new price comparison websites launched during the last few years.

But where to start?
The best starting point is to hire an ecommerce website developer to build a price comparison website for you. this will cost you average of 2000 to 3000 pounds. You could find cheaper deals at freelance websites like getfreelance.com

Indian developers will do the same job but cheaper. For example kaon software is an indian software company they have price comparison script for only $400

affilistore.com have a free price comparison script, it is easy to install but it is not easy to get the data feed configured properly. but if you have good php programming knowledge you can create a wonderful website.

popshops.com is a good alternative. you pay monthly (from $5.99 to $59.9) and they provide you with their script which will run on your website. Their problem is bad customer service once you signed up they don't care about your emails or contacts. they have also free basic but do not try this, it is not working.

goldencan.com is also a good solution. it is free but you do not have much control on your website.