WordPress Price Comparison Plugin: CompariPress Review - Real Screenshots

If you’re an affiliate marketer of physical products, you’ve probably realized that many physical products are sold by several online merchants.

For example, washing machines are sold on Amazon, by the merchant (who likely has an affiliate program) and possibly other online merchants.

One way to secure the sale is to provide a price comparison chart in your product review (or other product informational articles) so that your readers can check out the best deal directly from your website.

The problem of setting prices on your product review website:

The problem with manually setting out prices of the products you promote is that prices change all the time. Merchants and online retailers run sales and discounts throughout the year. Therefore, you either have the wrong price posted a lot of the time, or you have to go into your posts all the time to manually update the prices.

2 primary benefits of a WordPress price comparison plugin:

You can improve your affiliate sale conversions by providing multiple purchase options and pricing directly on your website.
A good price comparison plugin uses data-feed technology which updates pricing on your website automatically.

WordPress price comparison plugin vs. WordPress price comparison theme

The advantage of using a WordPress price comparison plugin is that you can use it on your existing WordPress theme. Perhaps you really like your WordPress theme and don’t care to change it. Using a plugin instead of a theme enables you to add product price comparison functionality within your existing theme.

Which WordPress price comparison plugin is worth trying?

I gave CompariPress price comparison plugin a try. I don’t use it on this review website because digital products (themes and templates) are seldom sold on websites other than the vendor’s site. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a try to see how it works. I purchased CompariPress and set it up on a test website to see how it worked.

My CompariPress Review

There are 2 purchase options:

$7 for 30 days and $10 per month thereafter; or
$97 one-time cost for a lifetime license (upgrades for 12 months).

I went with the $7 trial.

Is CompariPress easy to set up?

It’s somewhat easy. It’s certainly not as easy as other plugins. Moreover, it takes a little time to get it set up.

In order to get CompariPress going you must input your affiliate network information (IDs and other codes) for each online merchant/affiliate network with whom CompariPress pulls pricing data. This process takes a little while. The following are screenshots of what you have to input for the Amazon configuration:

You must enter similar information for each merchant/affiliate network.

However, with your purchase you get a user-manual which is well-written and steps you through the process.

Creating price comparison charts

Once you’ve configured the design of this plugin and entered your merchant/affiliate network ID information, you must create your charts. This too was fairly easy, but it takes a little bit of practice to figure out which keywords to enter so that the correct products display.

The following is a screenshot of the panel where you create a price comparison chart:

Which merchants/affiliate networks does CompariPress pull pricing data from?

Amazon
CJ.com
AvantLink
LinkShare
Affiliate Window

How do you place price comparison charts into posts and pages?

This is where CompariPress is fantastic. It uses shortcodes (which I love). Once you create a price comparison chart (which they call a PCU), you generate a shortcode which you place wherever you want in your website.

What do the price comparison charts look like?

The following are a few samples of the charts you can create with CompariPress plugin:

Which types of websites can benefit from CompariPress price comparison plugin?

Affiliate review websites and product information websites are ideal for the CompariPress plugin.

However, it’s only worth using if the products you promote are sold on more than one merchant site. Moreover, the products you promote obviously need to be part of the merchants / affiliate networks supported by CompariPress (see the list of merchants and affiliate networks above).

Generally, websites that promote physical products benefit the most from price comparison plugins.

How good is CompariPress support?

It’s okay. I submitted 2 support tickets. It took about 18 hours for them to respond. Moreover, the response referred me to existing articles. It wasn’t terribly helpful, but they were reasonably prompt. The fact is there is support available.

Will using CompariPress price comparison plugin increase conversions?

Maybe. It’s not a sure thing. Nothing is. However, you won’t know if you don’t try.

My suggested approach with the CompariPress plugin

Get the $7 thirty day CompariPress trial.
Install it and use it on a few product promotion pages/posts that receive a decent amount of traffic.
Monitor sales volume for a week or two.
If the conversion rate is higher, it’s a keeper. If there’s no change or it’s worse, dump it. You’ll only have invested $7. Please note that in order to properly test the effectiveness of this WordPress price comparison plugin, you must have sufficient traffic to the page/post. Therefore, if your website is new and you have little or no traffic, you can’t expect sales.

If you have a new website, then you’ll have to wait in order to see if CompariPress works for you. You could buy traffic if you want to test it immediately. Remember to test it with and without the plugin on your test pages and posts.

This testing approach minimizes how much time you spend setting it up. For instance, if you have 100 posts, it will take a long time to create that many price comparison charts and place them in the respective posts. Instead, create a few and test it. This way you save yourself plenty of time.

Where else can you learn about affiliate marketing with affiliate review websites?

You can get my free Definitive Guide to Affiliate Review Websites here. This guide steps you through building affiliate review websites – applying the techniques I use for building profitable affiliate review websites.

WordPress Price Comparison Plugin: CompariPress Review – Real Screenshots