I purchased Price Tapestry and have created a bit of a test site. It doesn't seem to do much comparing at the moment. Can somebody please tell me, how difficult is it to create a comparison site like the one below (notice the quality of the table and how useful it is - number of options etc).
Can this be done easily with Price Tapestry or would it require quite a lot of work? I am hopeless with PHP so I would not be able to do this myself.
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Thanks for any help.
Thanks David for your help. I was considering asking for my money back on account of my lack of experience, but I think if I can nail this (perhaps with a bit of your assistance), it will be worth it in the end!
I notice in my feeds they include all the information I require, e.g. network, tariff, minutes, etc.
Basically I want to categorise phones (e.g. by manufacturer) and then when a user clicks on a particular phone, they would see a table with this information:
Network
Tariff
Line Rental
Texts
Minutes
Price
Contract Length
Incentives
(If a picture of the network and merchant can also be displayed within the table I would like this - but I can try and deal with that later on).
Thanks for the info, i'll follow up by email...
Cheers,
David.
Hello avarly, and welcome to the forum.
Price Tapestry will be an excellent core script for you to create a mobile phone comparison table similar the one shown on the site you linked to; however it does require a bit of customisation; in particular with regards to adding the fields that you would want to show for mobile phone comparison, such as contract length, free texts, free minutes etc.
First of all, as you have discovered, merchants don't make it easy for us by using quite different product name values for the same products. This is where Price Tapestry's "Product Mapping" feature comes in. You'll find the link in the top menu on the /admin/ home page. This will let you set a fixed product name for a particular product, and then on the configuration page you can list all the alternative product names that different merchants use for the same item (phone in your case). For example, you might create a product name "Nokia N91", and then on the configuration page, add N91 as an alternative, if, let's say, you have a merchant that does not include the brand name in the product name.
That might sound like a bit of work; but the effort will pay off in the quality and usefullnes of your site; and unfortunately it's not something that can be easily automated; so everybody running similar sites will have to go throught he same process - particulary where you want to compare off datafeeds and earn the maximum commission possible as opposed to going for a white label solution in which you share the commission with a 3rd party.
Secondly, the script as it stands does not have fields set-up that you can register for other parameters of the product; in the case of mobile phones these might be things like contract lenght, number of free minutes, free texts etc. However, if this information is readily available in your feeds, it is relatively easy (with a little PHP and MySQL programming experience) to add these fields to your site. Full details are in this thread:
http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/313
However, I appreciate you are new to PHP, so I'd be happy to help you with setting this up. As I suspect you will not have yet customised the script in any other way, if you let me know what fields you would like to register / import, I can create a customised distribution for you with these fields included! I'm out and about today (although I do have forum access) but will be able to help you with this later this evening or first thing tomorrow if you let me know what you'd like to be able to do!
All the best,
Cheers,
David.