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Comment by dgranda | Hacker News Reader

I run https://www.fortsu.es (also https://www.fortsu.co.uk, https://www.fortsu.de and https://www.fortsu.com) a price comparison website for running shoes. Original one is focused on spanish market while expanding into interesting ones.

It started as side project some years ago when I wanted to buy running shoes online and it has been improved over the time. To-Do list never ends ;)

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Very nice! Couple of questions if you could answer please. How do you host your site? How do you compare the similar products and aggregate them within your database? Unique identifies etc.

Thanks!

> How do you host your site?

TL;DR: entry level Virtual Private Server (VPS) per country.

Based on some SEO articles, I decided to go for Top Level Domains depending on target market (.es for Spain, .de for Germany, etc.) so I needed properly geolocated IP addresses for each country. Each server is around 10 USD/month making this approach affordable. I do all operations.

> How do you compare the similar products and aggregate them within your database? Unique identifies etc.

Each product is manually added (using self made web based template) into database basically because of custom description, picture and specifications. Similar products are linked based first on category and then using properties like weight and drop.

This is good advice. I'm going to be building a site and replicating across TLD and IPs like this across countries. My only question is, if you are using the same content (ie, you write content on the blog for SEO) across each site do you run into trouble with Google for copying existing content?

I am sorry I can't provide a reliable answer to this because my english based sites need more traction, but Google (GWT) does not complain as long as hreflang attributes are properly set.

I'm interested in this kind of projects I have a lot of experience working with scrapers. How do you earn money from them? via affiliate sales?

Yes, affiliate marketing is the main source of income.

I am slightly introducing kind of business inteligence in order to sell reporting to merchants willing to know more.

I am interested in building something like this for Android phone comparison.

Can you give some indication of stats: visitors, income etc?

Regarding Android mobile phones, check https://www.kimovil.com

Numbers change much from country to country but average conversion rate is around 2,3%

How do you market this? Is it mostly SEO or ads as well? Must be expensive if you want to compete with Nike and Adidas for clicks...

At the beginning it was basically word of mouth and niche related forums on the internet.

Then I started reading about SEO and advertising. Organic search more or less work but I got almost no traffic from a couple of banners on related pages during few months. I didn't try advertising networks like AdWords.

I don't see big brands as my competition. I have partnered with some but I don't think they sell much on the internet (typically higher price tags) compared to full equipped city centre stores.

Very cool, I've been thinking of doing an affiliate website for a while. But it seems like it could take a lot of time and patience to get it profitable. Thanks for sharing!

The sooner you start it, the quicker you see some results ;)

To get the prices, do you go and copy them manually or have you written some crawlers?

Price data is retrieved from datafeeds parsing, triggering requests against APIs like Amazon [1] and using custom crawling.

[1] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...

i'd recommend adding sitewide hreflang across all your ccTLDs to the list ;)

hreflang attributes are in place, aren't they?

It took some time to get them properly in Google Webmaster Tools 0:)

At a glance, I can only see them in place on your respective homepages, where it only has limited value.

It should ideally be across all pages of all sites, so as to declare all 'sibling' pages, e.g.

https://www.fortsu.co.uk/running-shoes/all/trail

https://www.fortsu.de/laufschuhe/alle/trail

https://www.fortsu.com/running-shoes/all/trail

you can also use XML sitemaps to implement it, which tends to be preferable, especially if you don't want the extra bloat in the HTML of your pages.

I will double check category pages (those you point out) but I am sure hreflang attributes are in place for product pages ;)

I will check the XML sitemap stuff, thanks for the tip.

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