Hi all. I am a software engineer who also loves cycling. Being a cyclist I buy most of my gear online and I do it often. As an online shopper for cycling components I was having hard time finding the cheapest online store that sells a part that I want. As a side project of mine I've decided to build an automated price comparison website that would focus on cycling products specifically so I have developed http://pricecompare.bike.
The way it works is that it fetches products from several big online vendors offers easy way to search and browse these products and find the cheapest price for any given product across various online retailers. At the moment I have around 15 online retailers that I index daily with close to 200000 products in my database.
Currently the following online shops are indexed: Chain Reaction Cycles, Evans Cycles, Tweeks Cycle, Hargroves Cycles, Merlin Cycles, Wiggle Online Cycle Shop, ProBikeKit, CycleStore, Performance Bike, RibbleCycles, AW Cycles, Cycle Surgery, Velo Champion, OutdoorGear UK
The unique features is that it manages to group the same product from different vendors under on the same product page (thus allowing you to select the cheapest online retailer for that product, if avaliable) and has a decent search engine. The grouping part is not perfect yet and I'm working on it implementing different algorithms to improve it.
I have built it completely from scratch. It took me about a year to get it to its current stage. It's developed using Ruby-on-Rails, with Postgres and Elasticsearch as databases. I'm currently working on marketing it and getting some feedback from users. I also some cool features that I'm developing such as a price history feature that will be able to tell you if the current product price is good and if you should buy it or not based on previous price history (like on flight reservation websites).
Let me know if you have any questions of feedback.
Thanks.
