Comparipress Review – The Ultimate Price Comparison Plugin?

Ben Johnson – The Brains Behind CompariPress
If you’ve ever done any affiliate marketing for an extended period of time, Ben Johnson is probably a name that will ring a bell. Ben is the mastermind behind the Affiliate Wizard website, which is well worth your time and energy. He’s also partially responsible for the phpOstock plugin, which allows you to add Overstock.com listings to your WordPress blog. Ben is fast becoming one of the most respected names in affiliate marketing, and he’s got a new product aimed at making price comparisons easy to implement – CompariPress.

What is CompariPress?
Put simply, CompariPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to place price comparisons of products from various affiliate networks on your WordPress site. The affiliate networks include Amazon, the Amazon Marketplace, Linkshare, and Commission Junction. These vendors combined offer literally millions of products for sale from thousands of different perchance. Depending on the affiliate program, you can earn from 3% up to 20% commission.

Ben calls CompariPress a “Price Comparison Unit,” which allows you to list the prices of products from different merchants. So, let’s say that you write a review of an Apple iPod Nano on your WordPress site. You could show how 10 different companies (or fewer, or more) priced the iPod. Imagine having products from Amazon, the Apple Store, Buy.com, MacMall, and Overstock on the same post.

The Advantages of CompariPress
The main advantage of CompariPress is that it helps two groups simultaneously – you and your reader. It helps you because you will receive a commission from the merchant (so long as you are approved by their program), and it helps the reader because he or she will find the best price on the product they’re viewing. You could even combine CompariPress with phpBay Pro to offer eBay listings.

How Does it Work?
I bought the CompariPress plugin the first day it was available, and I’ve already installed it on a number of sites and am seeing great results with it. As an experienced affiliate marketer, Ben knows a thing or two about flexibility, and the CompariPress plugin is incredibly flexible and customizable. You can customize the layout display settings of your products. I was able to purchase, upload, and configure the plugin in about an hour. It does take a while to configure the plugin, but that’s because it has so many options. You can also use it an unlimited number of sites. I tried Comparipress on a variety of WordPress sites and themes and encountered few issues. The only thing I had to do was have SOAP php extensions installed since my VPS server (hosted with ServInt) doesn’t come with SOAP preinstalled. It also requires SimpleXML and php 5.1.2.

Pros & Cons
The pros are pretty obvious – being able to list various products from a wide variety of merchants is impressive. That’s not to say it couldn’t stand some improvements. The manual has a couple of errors that slowed me down during the installation, and I wished I had greater control over the tables it displays. I also wasn’t crazy about the stock “Info” and “Buy” buttons that were included, but in the product’s defense, it does allow you to upload your own. For a v1 release, though, these issues are minor.

The Bottom Line
If you are a serious affiliate marketer, Comparipress might be the solution to your price-comparison woes. I know of no other plugin that allows so much flexibility for so little. There are similar products out there (Datafeedr, Popshops), but they all require monthly fees and still don’t have the flexibility of CompariPress, which is a one-time purchase and usable on 1,000 sites if you wish.