Frequently Asked Questions
A comprehensive price comparison offering can be added to almost any site which not only improves the visitors' experience but also helps to monetise the site, making you commission on every sale made through the service.
How does it work?
We maintain a comprehensive directory of retailers and their product catalogues. We manage all of the day-to-day housekeeping tasks of matching products between retailers and ensuring that the price and postage charges are accurate to within a few hours.
We then make this information available to you, the webmaster, through a suite of web services.
Pages on your site can 'consume' these services, comparing prices on products without the visitor being aware of how or where the information is coming from.
What is a web service?
There are many definitions but in essence, web services can be defined as
'a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network'
In this context, computer software that performs price comparison functions but responds to requests over the world wide web. In the same way that a visitor will type a particular web address into
a browser and a web server will return the page for that address, a 3rd party web page can request prices for a particular item from our web server and our server responds with prices accordingly.
What's the catch?
There isn't one. Retailers pay commission on all subsequent sales and we share this commission with you. The more sales you generate, the higher the proportion of commission you get to keep.
Why Intelligent Price Comparison?
Rather than simply use a daily feed of prices from retailers, we grab the prices whenever required – on demand. This ensures that the prices we present are as accurate and up to date as possible. We also use complex product matching programs that match products from different retailers. And when required, human intervention to correct wrongly or unmatched products.
Why a Price Comparison Web Services?
There are many ways to integrate 3rd party content such as Price Comparison
within a site. Traditionally this has been done within the browser using a scripting
language such as Java Script, or by referencing the 3rd party content in an iFrame
or other object (E.g. Flash).
Our approach has been to offer the service as a 'Web Service'. This means that the
content, products and prices, are available in a structured form for you to use any way
you want rather than via a third party script over which you have no control.
Because you don’t hold a product catalogue and list of retailers, whenever a user
requests prices for a product your web server will make a call to our web service.
We return the results in an XML document for your web server to format and serve to
the user in a form that gives you 100% control.
The diagram below shows how this process works.
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For further information please contact us