DVD/Blu-Ray Pricing Aggregation Tool

[Costafarian]

Hey everyone, been a while since I posted.

Currently I'm in the middle of my journey back into web development and marketing.

I had been toying around with the idea of putting together a web app that essentially gives me the best price for physical copies of movies. A tool that I myself would really like to have in my own arsenal since I love movies and prefer the physical copies of media over digital or streaming services. Currently teaching myself Python and JavaScript has led to me attempting to pursue this project further. Basically the functionality would be:

• Price comparisons from all major ecommerce retailers (Amazon, Wal-Mart, Ebay, Best Buy etc.)
• Prices would default of course to who has the best price for a certain movie or tv show.
• You could filter out whether or not you want DVDs or Blu Ray discs
• Maybe a page where one could browse through all of the deals of the day across multiple retailers.
• You'd make money through affiliate sales, and ads. Building an email list that sends these deals across multiple retailers to the customers.
• Could easily be developed into an app. To compare on the go.

However, I tend to get a bit ambitious with these things. And while I am very familiar with the design, configuration, and marketing behind a Wordpress website. I have never actually built a website from scratch. I've dipped my toes into a handful of programming languages, Python most of all. But I still don't quite think I fully grasp all of the concepts needed.

I recently purchased a web app off of Flippa.com to discover pre-made scripts from Codecanyon.net when examining the raw code. It was a cheap setback of like $150 to discover this. Because the initial plan was to buy a web app business and scale from there. But this told me I was going to need to go deeper and actually program these scripts myself.

I'm open to the harshest criticisms you have.

EDIT: I should also have mentioned that this would act as a kind of search engine. Similar to a site like ThePriceGeek.com which has sadly changed its business model. It previously would give you the best price possible for whatever you were searching for in Ebay. I'm hoping to be able to simultaneously search through several retailers in a similar way.

 

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[Jobless]

Hi, I am involved in price comparison for other categories of products.

One idea is, that before you integrate many price APIs, build price scraping software, create custom scripts for the website, affiliate accounts, etc. -- you build a static version of the website. Then you show this to people in the target audience and see how they use it, and if they are interested at all. From there you iterate, improve and grow organically.

I am not sure if physical movies are the best product category from an ad/affiliate point of view, but it's not terrible either, especially if you are interested in them yourself and understand the market and how they can be standardized in a price database. If there are many variations/versions of the same film, you may discover that it will take some serious effort to write a script that finds matches between different vendors and unifies them into one SKU.

Consider that very few people own one DVD or blu-ray. They either have none, or hundreds. Say they want five or more different DVDs -- you should be able to give them not only the cheapest vendor for each, but the cheapest in total for all five, or price-optimized further and split into multiple shipments. (Shopping optimization)

 

[Costafarian]

you build a static version of the website. Then you show this to people in the target audience and see how they use it, and if they are interested at all. From there you iterate, improve and grow organically.

I was looking into building a static website recently, through some resources I found. It isn't all done through something like Wordpress. One particular thing I looked into was Jekyll and it was difficult to understand how one builds and hosts this.

Of course I'm juggling a few other projects at once so I didn't spend too much time with it when I could spend time on sites I have more of an idea how to approach.

That just leaves the problem of getting people interested in testing this.

I am not sure if physical movies are the best product category from an ad/affiliate point of view, but it's not terrible either, especially if you are interested in them yourself and understand the market and how they can be standardized in a price database.

I wanted to build a brand around the app itself and throw in merch and recommendations/reviews with an email campaign. But if there's one thing the short squeeze of GME taught me in January was that people aren't giving up on physical media.

That said, I could shift this entirely to shopping for video games. Which can also add a layer of complexity as well. But this market is also something that I believe is still full of shoppers who will buy physical copies new or second hand.