Quote from: notme on July 15, 2013, 10:28:11 PM

Quote from: SgtSpike on July 15, 2013, 10:26:16 PM

Why is there no "mother of all websites" for retailed goods? It seems like it would be a fairly simple thing to do. Retailers batch-submit the goods they have for sale to a given website. The website tracks price, qty in stock, what the item is, and useful specifications, matching up items as appropriate via UPC barcodes or whatever other unique identifiers they might have.

I suppose what I am picturing is sort of like Google Shopping, but with categorized items (enabling browsing by category) that are retailer-pushed rather than bot-scraped. Sort of like the eBay of retailing. eBay + Google Shopping, then, but without multiple listings per item. Amazon sort of has the right idea, but everything goes through them, so if a vendor isn't set up to sell through Amazon, you don't see their goods.

As a consumer, I would love to have such a website with comprehensive, up-to-date information on who to buy from and what the best prices are. Why hasn't a project like this been undertaken?

How will you motivate the retailers to push their data? Sure, you could argue it would bring them traffic, but that only applies to the retailer with the best price.

If 50% of the consumer base checks a massive website to find out where they should shop, wouldn't every retailer be clamoring to push their data to it?

Certainly there's a mass-acceptance barrier to it, I am just surprised no efforts have been made on that front.