Ideas

The idea is fair, but the scope is infinite. May be a better idea if you narrow down the scope and suggest a business proposition. Remember, that very few would pay you for a comparision, the revenue i can think of is - Ad revenue. But then again - SCOPE - Work on this one.

Thanks firefox

Your right no one pays for camprison, the revenue would be affiliate driven. Much the way epinions and shopping.com is.

Due to the amount of data required the rollouts would have to be Product line specific.

Where do you plan to obtain the data for the products? Isn't this going to take an incredible amount of manpower to intially enter all that information?

ThrasherC

Yes, you are correct there is a lot of data. I alot of it can be scrapped from the vendor's websites. Also if you only focus on products you can get an affiliate cut on it you narrow your product line.

I would imagine you would publish the added value of each part so the visitors could use it for their own use "in the field".

I used the mowers in the above example but I would imagine you would start with products that would likely be purchased online. Laptops and Desktops instantly jump to mind. How much does that added 1/2 gb of processor speed add when comparing an AMD to a Intel. etc.

I love number crunching ideas, I think you need to work on the algorithms required to process meaning from the data in an abstract way. If you can get it working in a spreadsheet your just a webdeveloper and a source database away from having the application running.

I'm still not sure how much revenue it could make but if you can make it popular, there will be a way to get value out of it.

Buyer's guide webalogue?=)

thats cool...but a huge task..even annual coolest product guide frm Time magazine is no a walk in the park!
but most products form car to fons and household appliances are serious on this "as is pick it" spectacle of SWOT showcase :
check this:
http://www.ebac.com/guide-comparison.php
even Yahoo joined the bandwagon:

http://news.com.com/...-1024_3-5080009.html

I see several problems with this. A couple have already been identified, but I think you need to be VERY sure you've addressed them:

- How will you generate all of the product-specific fields for the potentially infinite things one can buy?

- How will you harvest all of the data and convert it into a form that fits your database as defined above?

- How will you deal with the fact that different shops have wildly different pricing schemes and offer different extras packages, simply to make this sort of comparison difficult?

- How often will you be able to update all of this information?

This tells you nothing about the lifetime of the product or reliability. I personally want the mower brand that my neighbor has that has run for years.

I personally could care less if I am paying $1 per GB of hard disk space for one drive and $.90 for another. I want to know which one has a higher failure rate.

I think you can do some number crunching, but right now I don't know your angles for comparing or weighting things... needs some more thinking.

PhilipH

- We would focus on the 20% that represents the top of the market. Also we would focus on the devices that can be purchased through affiliate programs. The added value of each spec will be published so people can take the figures to their own shopping experience.

- We will focus on the MSRP and specs provided by the vendor. We will get them from their site or from the vendor alone.

- Since we will be building the product info off of the MSRP it really does not matter what the price is. When we load in the affiliate feeds we will get the sale price to keep those prices current. The added value of the specs will stay the same. The final sale price will be used to help define a "good deal"

- Depending on the popularity of the product lines would determine how offten the databases are updated. Probably quarterly. Things like laptops and other electronics should be able to be updated as they come onto the market. By using affiliate feeds as the basis of our database we will be able to be alerted of new products to load the specs into the database. The labor could be outsourced to do the reasearch and updates.

Thanks again for your comments.

cczad,

You are right there are several motivating factors on comparing products for purchase.

The methodology for building the algorithm and values is based is very simular to home apraisal systems.

When they run a comparable appraisal on houses in your neighborhood they look at your house and what the houses near you have. If the house has one more bedroom then yours, the system would take away the assessed value of a bedroom. The goal is to find a comparable value to see if the house you are looking at is worth what you are paying.

This same methodology can be used for anything as long as we can figure how much the specs are worth and have enough samples.

I generally trust the crowdpower behind Amazon.com. The only solution I'm looking for is a way to access all those peer reviews while standing outside of Lowes!

I agree with many of the comments above - there are literally infinite criteria people use to make decisions on whether or not to buy some particular product. How would you account for the "cool" factor or the fact that "all my friends" have that brand? I would definitely use this type of site but realizing the dream seems mind boggling.

the price is not the ultimate criterium sometimemes but it depends on various products

understand jumper666jr, that is my point. I ould be willing to pay more for the better product, but when there are so many variables, which is the best a value.