Price Comparison Pro
Pros
- Lets you scrape prices from any website
- WooCommerce integration
- Automatically update prices
- Create comparison sets
- Support for Amazon and Ebay locales
- Responsive
Cons
- Requires too much manual work to set links and price scraping
- Little pricey
Having good WordPress price comparison plugin installed on your site is a smart choice. Especially if your site is affiliate oriented or you write product reviews.
Your visitors are always looking to find the best deal. They want to compare prices for the particular product from various stores and find the best price for them to purchase.
With countless price comparison websites, it’s never been easier for customers to find the best prices around.
Then why wouldn’t you provide your visitors same option? It increases the chances that visitors will stay on your website and purchase through your affiliate link rather than finding a better price somewhere else.
I have already written about various plugins for price comparisons like Content Egg and Datafeedr. For more info see Content Egg review and Datafeedr review. Also, I wrote about price comparison themes for WordPress like WordPress Affiliate Theme – AffiliateTheme.io.
In this post, I will write about another affiliate price comparison plugin called Price Comparison Pro. If you are promoting affiliate products, it’s no longer enough to just provide your visitors with one price source.
They need to know they’re getting the best price. The only way to assure them that they are buying at the cheapest price possible is to give them price comparison.
That’s what this plugin is all about. Price Comparison Pro lets you scrape prices live from any web store and show them as a price comparison box to your site visitors. It is excellent way to create affiliate price comparison site with WordPress.
Table of Contents
Content Egg vs Datafeedr vs Price Comparison Pro
- NAME
- FREE VERSIONDoes the plugin have free (lite) version
- WORDPRESS INTEGRATIONDoes it have WordPress plugin
- WOOCOMMERCE INTEGRATIONCan you import products into WooCommerce
- AFFILIATE NETWORKSHow many affiliate networks does it support
- POWERFUL PRODUCT SEARCHSearch accross multiple affiliate networks and merchants simultaneously
- AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE PRODUCTS
- AUTOBLOGGINGAutomatically add products by set interval and settings
- AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE PRICESAutomatically update product prices based on set interval
- AUTOMATICALLY REMOVE PRODUCTSRemove automatically products which merchant doesnt sell anymore
- CHARACTER ENCODINGProperly handles special characters and accents when importing products
- CUSTOMIZABLE PRODUCT INFORMATIONCustomize product name, description any other details
- MERCHANT COUPONSDisplay available coupons for products or merchants
- SHOW PRICE HISTORYShow price history for particular product based on stores
- PRICE DROP ALERTSAllow visitors to subscribe to be notified when price drops for particular product
- STOREYA INTEGRATION
- DOWNLOAD IMAGESWill images be downloaded to your website
- SORTING FEATURESCan products be sorted by price, rating, brand, etc.
- RESPONSIVEWill generated content look great on handheld devices
- AFFILIATE LINK CLOAKING
- CREATE COMPARISON SETSBuild comparison sets so that you can display prices offered by different merchants
- PRODUCT DRIPPINGCreate new blog posts at random interval
- SUPPORT FOR AMAZON AND EBAY LOCALES
- ADD VIDEOSAbility to add YouTube videos to your content
- SPIN REWRITER INTEGRATEDDoes it come with spin rewriter tool
- CONTENT MODULEAbility to add additional content using Google Images, Bing Images, Google News and other modules
- WEB SCRAPING SERVICESome websites use Ajax to load their prices. This makes it impossible to grab the prices without simulating a browser. This is where web scraping comes into use.
- PRICE
- CONTENT EGG
- More than 20 affiliate networksAbility to have more with Affiliate Egg integration
- Yes using autoblogging feature
- Only in paid pricing plans
- $36 a year for single site license
- DATAFEEDR
- More than 30 popular affiliate networks
- Using driping feature
- $29/month cheapest pricing plan
- PRICE COMPARISON PRO
- Using shortcode
- You add stores you wish to use
- No product description
- From £59.25 – £186.50/year ($79 - $250)
WordPress Price Comparison Plugin
Price Comparison Pro integrates (use coupon KASA20 for 20% off discount when purchasing plugin) with WooCommerce to let you add third-party URLs to scrape, provides shortcodes to add price comparisons anywhere and even add multiple price comparison boxes to each page.
It works with Woocommerce or as standalone using shortcodes. Using this plugin you can show your site visitors the cheapest store to buy a particular product or compare prices of different products.
Price Comparison Pro will fetch prices live from other websites and it works with any product on any online store which has a price.
This will stop your visitors to site from leaving to research pricing. You can even optionally scrape images from the third-party URLs to improve the images contained on your own website.
And what kind of plugin would this be if you couldn’t add your own affiliate links? It is easy to add your affiliate exit links from any network to the price comparison box.
There are two ways to make it work for a particular page. You can either do it through WooCommerce or you can add a shortcode to a page.
The shortcode style is [pricecomparisonpro urls=”url1,url2,url3, etc” affiliateurls=”affurl1, affurl2, affurl3, etc”]. Simply replace url1, url2, url3 with the URLs of the pages from which you want to scrape a price.
The second way to add price comparison box is to edit your product using WooCommerce. On the General tab, you will find a button to add a Price Comparison URL pair.
There are two URLs that appear. The first is the direct URL of the page which contains the price. The second is where you can place your money-making affiliate URL.
WordPress Price Comparison Pro plugin adds up to 10 new pairs of fields to your WooCommerce products (non-WooCommerce shortcode also included).
You need to paste in up to 10 URLs for the stores where your visitors can buy the product in question and the plugin takes care of the rest.
If you want to add more than 10 URL, the plugin will notify you to use the shortcode instead which is unlimited. Whenever users visit that product page, the price comparison plugin will check those URLs and fetch a live price.
The second URL for each of these fields you enter an affiliate URL so you will earn affiliate revenue for any purchased made through these links.
WooCommerce product data edit
If you don’t enter a URL in the Affiliate URL box, Price Comparison Pro will attempt to use Skimlinks to monetize your link. For that, you need to enter your Skimlinks ID in the settings for Price Comparison Pro.
If you don’t enter an affiliate URL or a Skimlinks ID, Price Comparison Pro will fallback to just using the raw unmonetized link.
Price Comparison Pro Review
In order to scrape prices, you need to tell Price Comparison Pro where they are located. The plugin currently uses CSS selectors to handle this. This per-website approach means you don’t need to reconfigure the selector per product.
Configure once per website and then it will scrape all URLs you enter in your product pages (or shortcodes) using the relevant CSS selector for your site.
In “Settings” of WP-admin, click on “WordPress Price Comparison”. Scroll down to “Website configuration.”
The boxes are Domain, Logo URL, Expression Type, Price Selector, Sales Price Selector and Images Selector.
Domain: Enter the URL of the website from which you wish to scrape. Do not use the “Http” there, only the clean URL – (e.g. www.ebay.co.uk)
Logo URL: Enter the URL of a logo for this merchant. The logo will appear to the left of the price in the price comparison box. You can use HTTP or HTTPS in the logo field.
Expression Type: You can use CSS, XPath or Regular expression selectors to identify the price for the product on the page.
The easiest way to get the CSS selector correct is to visit the site you wish to grab the price from, right-click the price, Inspect Element (in Chrome), then on the right-hand side you will see CSS selectors which apply to this field.
If you want more advanced targeting please utilize the XPath or Regular Expression options. If you get stuck they have a paid service to configure these for you. Configuring the CSS selectors is a one-off job per website. Once they are configured, you just need to get the URLs to your product page.
Automating Insertion of the Price Comparison Pro Product URLs
If you have a large number of products, it makes sense to automate it. Unfortunately Price Comparison Pro doesn’t exactly have that option.
Currently the only way to import URLs for many products is using a plugin like WP All Import, and then just import into the relevant field names for them.
Ultimately, you need to enter the Price Comparison Pro URLs in the following product meta data:
- producturl1, producturl2 etc. (up to 10)
- pcproaffiliateurl1, pcproaffiliateurl2 etc. (up to 10)
Scraping Prices in Price Comparison Pro
Using Price Comparison Pro you can scrape prices using your own website with standard scraping. If you wish to simulate scraping from a different country, or you wish to rotate the scraper IP address to avoid detection then there is also an option for proxies.
Some websites use Ajax to load their prices. This makes it impossible to grab the prices without simulating a browser. You can check if a particular website is using Ajax by viewing the source of the page (CTRL+U on Chrome).
If you can’t find the price, it means the page is using Ajax to insert the price after the page has loaded. If you are scraping prices from these types of sites, you will have to use Web scraping Service with Price Comparison Pro plugin.
Once you purchased Web Scraping Service, you will need to visit your account page and enter the API key in Price Comparison Pro settings page in your WordPress admin area.
Scraping service works for every website without any limitations, and you can terminate the subscription whenever you want.
You may wish to also use scraping service with rotating proxies which guarantee you don’t get banned by any scraper-blocking mechanism your target site might be using.
Types of scraping options:
- Standard scraping – No proxy, no parse
- Basic proxied – Uses random proxy from the specified proxy list to request page
- Basic PhantomJS Parsing – Loads data after the page has been parsed and javascript executed on Price Comparison Pro’s servers
- Advanced PhantomJS Proxied Pre-parsing – Uses random proxy from the specified proxy list to request before loading in PhantomJS as above
Dave (author of the Price Comparison Pro plugin) told me about his plans for the plugin:
- Add cookie support to the non-scraping service code – this allows users to set cookies for websites, e.g. if they wish to change language, location or something else
- Improved admin settings page
- Remove limit of 10 URLs per product
- Add website search feature – Planning to add settings to the back end to let users choose which websites to search per product category (or site-wide). Then, when that product page is loaded, the plugin will ajax search the target site for the product name and save the product URL if found, then from there it’ll be normal price comparison.
- Record clicks on outbound links for admin reporting page
Price Comparison Pro PROS & CONS
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of using the Price Comparison Pro plugin:
CONS
- Too much manual work by adding links for each product from each store
- You need to configure CSS selectors for each website store you wish to use affiliate links in
- Plugin settings page could look better
- Adding links through WooCommerce limited to 10 product URLs
- Web Scraping Service is charged separately
PROS
- Fetch prices live from other websites automatically
- Option to set price cache age (How long would you like to retain scraped prices for before automatically checking them again)
- Option to add Skimlinks ID
- Option to use proxies
- Affordable plugin price
- Web Scraping Service
WordPress Price Comparison Plugin Final Words
Price Comparison Pro lets you scrape prices from any website and display them in a comparison box. It lets you enter a URL to scrape as well as an affiliate URL to deep link to.
You must configure each website you are scraping so that the plugin knows where to grab the price (enter the CSS selector for the price).
If you do not have affiliate relationships with all the websites you scrape, you can optionally use Skimlinks to backfill affiliate deals. Installing and configuring Price Comparison Pro is fairly easy. The hardest part is setting CSS selectors to identify the price on the page.
Other features that Price Comparison Pro comes with are Price Cache Age to set how long would you like to retain scraped prices before automatically checking them again.
It is recommended that you keep this figure fairly high to avoid your server being blacklisted from websites you are scraping prices.
There are Styling and Display Options if you wish to restyle the Price Comparison Pro box. It is very limited, so don’t hope for too much. You can use default theme styling or custom styling.
If you choose custom, CSS box will appear. You can use default style provided by a plugin by copying its style.css. Other than that if you don’t know to work with CSS, it will not do much good for you.
Update Woocommerce Prices/Images feature lets you update the WooCommerce product price and the external_url for the product to match the cheapest price found.
Saving images lets Price Comparison Pro pull images from the merchant. This option lets you automatically extract better images from merchants and update your product.
Price for Price Comparison Pro plugin goes from £59.25 – £186.50 ($79 – $250) depending if you are purchasing one site license, five sites or unlimited.
Updates and support are for one year and after each year license needs to be renewed. You can use coupon KASA20 to get 20% off.
If you wish to use Web Scraping Service, depending on the plan you choose, you will need to pay from £2.99 / month to £29.99 / month. Plans depend on how much prices you need to scrape and pages per day.
Overall Price Comparison Pro plugin has potential and it is a good choice if you need to scrap prices or use stores which use Ajax to load prices or are not integrated into other WordPress price comparison plugins.
If you intend to use Amazon, eBay, and other popular stores which are part of affiliate programs like Shareasale, Linkshare, Commission Junction, then I recommend choosing something like Content Egg or Datafeedr.
If you know a better plugin for making affiliate price comparisons from various stores and automatically updating prices, or you have used Price Comparison Pro plugin let me know in the comments below.
DISCLOSURE: Posts may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of those links, I might get a small commission, without any extra cost to you. Read more about it here.
I am wanting to build a new WP site using an already purchased template.
This site is quite unique in the fact that it is a price comparison site with the ability to display multi vendors products on a pay-per-click basis.
Code is created to fetch vendors products via XML/CSV and displayed on my site. Each time a vendors product is clicked the user is redirected to the vendors own website.
The vendor is billed for each time their product is clicked.
The vendors must have their own admin section where they are able to see their click balance, pay and top up their clicks, view their products, add their preferred payment options, update their profile details and see monthly/weekly click reports and be able to download these reports via CSV.
I am looking for someone to help me develop this site for a % share of the company or an agreed fee which can be paid once the first few vendors have signed up. I already have 10+ vendors with over 1 million product listings that have indicated they will signup for this service. I have tried to use a freelancer but they wasted my time as they did not know what they were doing code wise. I am sure there are plugins that would make life easier which would probably require someone to customize. If this sounds like something that would interested please contact me. Further details and examples of similar sites can be provided. I have trawled through hundreds of plugins and well cannot find the correct one and places like Dokan and Rehub etc etc will not work as this site is a different kind of affiliate site.
Byron – byron.chadband123@gmail.com
Hi Bryon,
I don’t do freelancer work or take any jobs. You would be best to find person on Codeable or Freelancer website.
Hi Kasa,
I’ve used Content Egg and it works very well. Thinking to try Price Comparison Pro.
Any suggestion?
Hi Pravin,
What kind of suggestion are you trying to get? Can you elaborate?
Hi Kasa, Excellent article with deep research.
Can I get any reliable wp plugin that can do the product comparison as well as price comparison among various merchants?
Many thanks
Hi,
Could you clarify your question?
Hi Kasa,
Thanks for your reply, I want to create a digital products affiliate website which compares the products feature and products price too.
In other words, I need a wp plugin for my wp website which can be used in making products feature comparison and price comparison among online merchants.
e.g. Feature comparison among any particular model of Smartphone brand one plus, iPhone, nexus, Samsung note etc, and finally give the price comparison of anyone finalized brand product among various online merchants so the customer can click on the best price button and should redirect to the related merchant.
I hope i have explained well.
Many Thanks
Hi Kasa
I want to create a wp website which should compare the features of similar products from different brands or models from the same brand
e.g. Redmi note 8 vs Redmi note 8 pro vs Realme 6 etc,
and after choosing any one product the price comparison also should be available from different online merchants
e.g. Amazon vs Flipkart vs aliexpress, etc..
And another one query: Which plugin is best for downloadable kinds of stuff affiliated site and which is the best plugin for a digital marketing agency, please.
Reply is highly appreciated.
Many thanks
To compare features of similar products and show price comparison from different merchants I recommend combination of Rehub theme + Content Egg plugin. Just be noted that this will require much manual work.
Could you clarify your second question regarding downloadable stuff? I don’t understand what features you exactly need.
Hi Kasa
You are prompt on the reply that is truly great, Thank you so much,
Downloadable stuff I mean to ask is any kind of software, e-books, apps, audio/video courses, etc.
And kindly suggest the best theme and plugin for a “digital marketing agency” and “online one to one private tuition” also, please.
Thanks
So you are saying what is the best plugin for promoting digital stuff? There is no special for that. You can use Content Egg or Price Comparison Pro plugin.
For a digital marketing agency, you can really use any theme. My suggestions would be Astra or GeneratePress.
You can use Tutor LMS for private tuition, courses, etc.
Great review. I have been using Price Scrape Pro from Gealtra but they can’t scrape ajax pricing. Bought the plugin. Support seems non-existent and bouncing around their support pages trying to figure out which end is up is super frustrating. Plugin has a decent install & initial setup article but even that was not easy to find. Their demo site with examples of configs is not working. Just could never get the price blocks to look good with the limitations on woocommerce placement. If it works out of the box for you, great. Seems like a well thought out plug-in. Just don’t expect a lot of help/support.
Hi Doug,
Thanks for sharing your experience with the plugin.
After reading Kasa’s review, I went ahead and bought Price Comparison Pro yesterday.
After just a couple of hours, I had everything set up the way I want it, and 7 out of the 8 online stores which I wanted to use it with are working great.
So I just wanted to say… thanks Kasa for the review, and that as of November 2019, this plugin is still working as intended.
Use Kasa’s link: https://www.wpintense.com/product/price-comparison-pro/?wpiref=383
And the discount code: LEWIS25
Take care!
Hi Andy,
Thank you for sharing your experience with this plugin and glad to hear that my review help you.
Do not buy Price Comparison Pro, you will never get support. The plugin is not working with the majority of sites.
Hi,
Sorry to hear you had issues. Could you write what exactly was your issue? It might help other readers decide.
FRIDAY13 doesn’t work either
Use kasa20 for 20% off
Hi
That one seems to have expired also?
Regards
David
I will then need to contact plugin author as that were the codes I was provided.
Hi, Kasa, thank you for article, and the coupon code has expired.
Try FRIDAY13
Hi I am looking for a solution that will let me import all product data in bulk for my product niche namely a specific brand of toy, so that users can search for a toy and compare the price at UK retailers. ie a price comparison search engine. Is this possible with any of the above? Thanks in advance!
It is possible with all three though it will require manual work. Maybe it would be best that you try Datafeedr from mentioned tools.