In some cases – digital subscriptions, for example – products have different levels of pricing, but only one source (ie. you can only sign up directly from the vendor of that software, so there’s no price comparison between different stores, but between different tiers). It’d be useful to be able to display these as comparisons – and to be able to pull in other additional data – as well as a single price for a single product.
price alerts / deal alerts with push notifications
It would be great if the price comparison pro could send out push notifications. So visitors can follow their selected products and receive a push notification when a product goes on sale or reach a certain price.
store prices in post meta
I see the foundthru site currently failing to show prices. I believe I’ve seen PC pro uses transients. if transient price data has been purged, and the script is not able to fetch prices, it will fail to show prices.
It would be great if PC pro would just store prices in postmeta. It could render it server side making, also making it easier for search engines to see it (may be beneficial for SEO if combined with rich snippets markup).
Transients could still be used as an enhancement, ie it could still fetch these after page load and update prices if succesful. Pricing already rendering server side could be hidden until the ajax completes or returns an error.
Select which links to nofollow
Add selector to add rel=nofollow to some or all the external links.
Make “Price Comparison Pro Tool” internationalization making it ready for translation
For the people using your plugins in countries that don’t have english as their primary language it would be great if you could include the necessary strings to make it ready for translation.
This could be easily accomplished by wrapping translatable strings in special gettext functions.
For a start it would be enough to make the front-end texts translatable.
Add Price Alerts, Price History and Cron price-checking
This is a feature I really want to see myself, but some customers have also requested something similar too now.
When a customer is using Price Comparison Pro in a particular niche, it would be particularly beneficial to their users to be able to enter their email address and receive price alerts when the price drops or rises (configurable).
This would massively increase engagement, since users would be able to receive price alerts across multiple merchants from our customers niche website. It would increase signups to their newsletter at the same time as I’d see that as an option we’d want to include (i.e include MailPoet/MailChimp integration)
Price Alerts require a cron job to check the prices on a regular, configurable basis. A customer has requested cron-based price checking, not for price alerts, but for the ability to ensure their WooCommerce ‘cheapest’ price remains up to date. I’ve given them a workaround for this at the moment, but having a cron job would be great for this.
At the same time, storing and visualising price history would enable the price alerts – e.g. showing a little graph next to the prices from each merchant – when you hover over it, it could show prices and date the price was obtained. The reason I feel this is linked/connected, is because cron underlies all of this and because seeing a changeable graph would likely initiate the user to sign up for price alerts.
For example, the Yeti Microphone which I regularly use as a demo product for Price Comparison Pro – a month ago, Amazon dropped the price down to £79. It’s back up to £99 now and still at £119 many places. A price alert from the niche website would have covered this price drop from 6 merchants.
On top of that, the benefits for my customers are large in that with price alerts, their users are then going to come back to my customers website and click through THEIR affiliate links which should significantly increase their affiliate revenue.
If anyone has any additional comments to add to this, please add them!
Add ‘clear cache’ button to allow manual clearing of the price cache
A customer has pointed out that it’d be great to be able to manually clear the entire cache because the sites they’re scraping may be running sales etc and they want to fetch fresh prices.
FAQ listed here: https://www.wpintense.com/faq/price-comparison-cache-reset/
Save all prices scraped per product to meta-data or local table
A customer has indicated it would be useful to be able to analyse prices scraped in the past and there’s no good reason not to provide this feature.
A storage mechanism needs to be chosen as this table could get quite large – ideally storage options in the interface would be best.
Save the following data:
ProductID, URL, ScrapedURL, ScrapedWebsite, Price, Sale Price, ImageURLs (+ any other data scraped)
Add AMP Compatibility to Price Comparison Pro
From user:
When a visitor enters my site on an AMP enabled page, the price comparison table appears in the upper right corner of the screen which makes the page look terrible.
Please view these urls on your mobile device to see what I am talking about.
https://statue.news/2017/09/15/kantai-collectoin-kashima-valentine-mode-pvc-figure-by-quesq/
https://statue.news/2017/09/15/kantai-collectoin-kashima-valentine-mode-pvc-figure-by-quesq/amp/
With Google placing a lot of emphasis on AMP these days, I believe it is important to ensure this plugin is AMP compatible.
This is mostly an HTML and CSS alteration and will be included in the next upgrade.