I’ve spotted a little niche for a price comparison service, and there are no competitors (that I can find). As yet I’ve no idea whether it will work or not, so I don’t want to invest any significant time or money into it, and have plenty of other stuff on my plate, but I am kind of confident it will work. 

So, my question is “how best to build it quickly and cheaply?”.

I’ve had a google round for templates, but can’t find anything that obviously solves the slightly unique setup I’ll need, and the really bespoke builders are very expensive. Or, at least, more expensive than I’m willing to invest right now.

The main functionality that can’t really be automated is the input of the supplier data, which the supplier themselves will have to do as it’s in an industry where they don’t tend to publicly publish their prices. It’s fairly basic data though, and will be be doable with a simple-ish form. 

That data will be held in a database and presented anonymously to the user based on their quote requirements (think CompareTheMarket.com but *much* simpler). Then I just need to work out how to charge the supplier for each referral. The final product isn’t sold online, so I’ll need to charge them for the introduction to the customer (maybe a small charge for each intro email sent or something). Although in the early days I may just provide the service free to get suppliers signed up.

Aaaanyway, if anyone has any thoughts on how best to go about this to get a real simple proof-of-concept hack online (or even if any enterprising developer thinks it might be worth a day or two of their time for moderate fee or a decent equity stake), then let me know. 

My research suggest there’s some platforms like Magento (and obviously Wordpess) that in theory have plugins and modules that would kind of do the trick, but it seems like you’d need a lot more tech ability than I have to make it work.