Online Product Comparison Tool Development for Motoquotes
About
Motoquotes was the UK's first tyre & MOT product comparison site, comparing the motor insurance market.
The challenge
For Motoquotes, UK-based company, the Order Of Code team (OOC, now a part of SoftwareHut) designed and developed a database for product comparison.
Solutions
WHAT HAVE WE DELIVERED?
The scope of the project included online product comparison tool for drivers, offering best deals for new tyres and MOT tests. To complete this project, the OOC team had to come up with a solution to gather data from multiple data sources. While some retailers provided their APIs, the challenge was to obtain current data from those who didn’t.
Another aspect of developing this product comparison tool included scalability. With the website’s growth, it should allow motoquotes’ team to add new retailers and offers progressively.
The project consisted of two key elements:
- A scalable database for storing products and offers, with set procedures for updating, browsing (including full text search) and automatic mapping.
- A web tool (crawler) for finding products and scraping price information regularly.
First, the team had to solve an issue with matching the same products from various retailers, even if there were some missing descriptions. Then, scrapers were designed and scheduled so to avoid being detected and blocked by the websites.
Internal requests and reducing latency issues were fixed with Rabbit MQ, which enhanced live update process.
OOC have been an asset to motoquotes from the outset. We required a competent company to take our ideas and return professional results that have been optimised for the web. OOC have vast experience in this area which provided confidence that the final product would be as expected and capable of being a strong challenger within a competitive market. We look forward to growing with OOC and the team.
Stuart Armstrong, CEO
Motoquotes
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Results
The team had successfully overcome the obstacles, delivering a project meeting client’s business goals. As a result, the API that has been delivered was able to provide data through a variety of queries, gathering the data from third-party websites.
The motoquote’s users were able to search by tyre specifications, license plate numbers, or car model. Additionally, they could have sort results by price and add additional filters, including distance from a user based on provided postcode.
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