Airsoft comparison website

[Grimworld]

Hi

I hope this is the right place to post this, I have spent a few days working on a comparison website that shows guns from a range of different websites. It is a work in progress website and does still need some work. 

The link is: www.airsoftcompare.co.uk < though this is having issues at times and the other address is: http://www.compareairsoft.esy.es/

Its free to use and paid for by adds and donations  Would love some feedback on this!

Thank you for your time.

 

[warlord]

Interesting. One immediate suggestion I'd make is add the name of the source website to the search results. I searched for "VFC Avalon Saber" and got lots of results, but all from the same site, which you don't know until you click them.

 

[Sacarathe]

Quite cool, but needs a lot of work, I assume the problems I've encountered are due to automation. Often it did not recognise the gun by name - have you considered sorting guns by manufacture part numbers and assigning name variables to those unique identifiers?

Auto complete would be handy or a database of guns by manufacturer - so I can enter the page, click G&G and the click Combat Machine, and then click CM18 TAN. And then select parts of the world, by retailer location, eg UK, US, CAN, HK, JP, EU, and then select currency.

List of all retailers in each zone would also be handy to allow deliberate exclusions.

Further to that, going through each retailer and creating a postage summary profile would be great too - for example JD airsoft ships via UPS for free. But other stores charge £6-12.

EDIT:

Sorting results in text only would be nice, no reason for such a massive page. Just these collumns:

Gun name (for verification purposes), price, Store name, URL, Stock level, CS rep.

You could also add a button for your users to check if automation is too difficult, by asking "was this gun in stock".

EDIT2:

Can see this being a great tool, would you be able to open it up a little so that a list of all the webstores in the database can be read - and a button corresponding this "suggest retailer".

 

[Andyraven]

pretty nice. would be nice if i could change it to lowest price first.

 

[Grimworld]

Thanks for all the feedback, I will slowly get to work on the suggestions  

 

[Sacarathe]

Thanks for all the feedback, I will slowly get to work on the suggestions  

How does the site select user location, and preferred continent/currency?

I see no way to search with specific limitations.

 

[Grimworld]

At the moment is UK based only because that was my target market, at the moment because it is a free website it uses web scraping to gather all the details which does take around 1 to 2 hours to update the database.

I do hope to eventually get enough money through ads to move to a word press website and use a auto scraper that will pull the data and keep the database up to date.

 

[Albiscuit]

Love the idea...

Havent had a look yet, but good work so far for the concept!

 

[warlord]

Eventually you should consider sponsorship liek the Google sponsored links. See if retailers will give you access to an price list type api rather than scraping. It could be in their interest to promote their sales.

You also might want to scrape reviews too. Help to make your site the first site people go to. Hmm, compairsoft, milsim supermarket or shootthemeerkat.com

 

[rsciw]

Somewhat similar to this, not?
https://airsoftnation.co.uk/stockchecker/

Shows stock of sites, but not the prices however.

 

[Samurai]

Somewhat similar to this, not?
https://airsoftnation.co.uk/stockchecker/

Shows stock of sites, but not the prices however.

I was just about to post that. AN did this about 2 days ago.

 

[Grimworld]

I had not seen that product checker before that's really good, I was just sick of trying to find the gun I wanted at a price I was willing to pay.

I have so far managed to get the items to display in price order so that is one of my checklist completed.

I do like the idea of the companies giving me excel documents with everything I need on it as that would make everything a million times easier!

 

[Samurai]

I do like the idea of the companies giving me excel documents with everything I need on it as that would make everything a million times easier!

Oh, noes. You don't want that. I deal with that in daily basis with my job. Clients just can't get the import files correctly ever. They add a few comments, rearrange it, rename things, and the worst is when they copy it from Word.

 

[Grimworld]

Oh, noes. You don't want that. I deal with that in daily basis with my job. Clients just can't get the import files correctly ever. They add a few comments, rearrange it, rename things, and the worst is when they copy it from Word.

Yeah that does not sound fun, never realised how awkward it is with files and databases! Took me a day to figure out that data was not inputting because I missed a capital letter on the excel sheet :/

 

[rsciw]

What Samurai said, you really don't want that. (Unless you're a masochist or something and like pain )

Ideally shops would have an API you could query, but I doubt that it's a priority for retail shops nor is it probably not in their interest (works for hotels / flights etc. though)

 

[skillfulmmd]

Could do with adding suggestions or brand filters.

For instance, I was searching for EL-104 PMC and it was bringing up 0 results whereas whacking that in Google would show a load of shop links. 

 

[Castle]

Somewhat similar to this, not?
https://airsoftnation.co.uk/stockchecker/

Shows stock of sites, but not the prices however.

I was just about to post that. AN did this about 2 days ago.

I think you're unaware that AN just used a widget from Airsoftdb.com. weaponcrates.com/checker has been around for the same amount of time as Airsoftdb.com

@Grimworld

What you want to do is ask stores for a product index or product XML Url so you can use something like HTML_SIMPLE_DOM to scrape the data into your database.

 

[callumbagshaw]

Does your search have a wildcard function? I couldn't actually find anything anyway, but say I searched for "KC02", that should also return results for "KJW KC02", "KC-02", "KJW KC-02" etc. etc. 

Also, after hitting search, there is not a "no results found" type message, and there is also no "home" button to return you back to the original URL, so if I hammer like 10 different searches into the search bar, I have to press back 10 times to get to the homepage.

Good concept though I like it! 

 

[Grimworld]

Thanks for all the replies, it was having a lot of issues yesterday as I was coding when I could at work and taking the database down for a while.

At the moment it is fully down while I make some changes.

So far I have managed to change;

It should now be in low to high though some are not for unknown reasons

It now tell you which website the item is from

It also gives you a rough estimate for shipping to the UK only

It now tells you if the item is in stock or not in stock

Im working on these still so it might be down for a few days while I carry on making these changes, Ill post when its back up for people to have another play with.

Thanks

 

[Grimworld]

Its back up and running

www.airsoftcompare.co.uk

I will add a exact search feature and a home button soon, once I have some more time for coding.

What are peoples reactions now to it?