But seriously, Ikea's EXPEDIT series should be in here, at the very least, and considering they have a whole "Storage Furniture" section, is a better target than Target.
Storage furniture:
Pantry
Wardrobes
Bed storage
Headboards
Nightstands
Dressing tables
Bookcases
Cabinets & sideboards
Chests of drawers
Clothes storage systems
Drawer units
DVD & CD furniture
Filing cabinets
Heavy duty storage systems
Shelving units
TV stands & media solutions
Wall shelves
Your app is great -- just needs the goods.
TidyFinder is the first step towards that goal. I'd appreciate any feedback/criticism/suggestions that you can offer. I value the HN community's thoughts. Thanks.
App and scrapers are written in Python with MongoDB storage. I was pleasantly surprised with MongoDB's query speed given I only index keywords. There are a small number of products in the database, but its still very fast.
To get the data I've created scrapers for each site. Currently, only Target and Amazon are implemented (with Container Store soon to come). Target and Container Store provide a product feed when you sign up as an affiliate. They FTP their product info to your site and I use that to parse the links. Using each link, I then scrape the page to store the relevant information for various products in the database. Amazon provides a nice API and there is a Python wrapper which makes it easy to query (python-amazon-product-api).
You need an individual product page with its own URL for every item, and you need a strategy for getting inbound links, including to those deep product pages. You need content on those pages - reviews and ratings (scrape Amazon, maybe, or product catalogues).
In other words, to make some cash out of this (and the five gajillion other sites you could set up in other niche verticals), you have to content spam the holy hell out of the Internet. Not something friendly to the HN crowd, but that's what works.
Once you've done that, and you have some traffic, you can sell CPC traffic to online stores in exchange for favorable placement. And once you've done that, you're probably making enough money to start measuring the expected value of a user for each inbound search term and buying more, paid traffic - especially when your SEO doesn't have you in position #1.
And then you'll have a comparison shopping site, which can print money - until Google updates its search engine and pulls the rug out from under you. Print the money, but put it in your pocket.
Immediate steps for expanding your product selection / hopefully making more cash - most of the major comparison shopping sites today have affiliate product feeds.
"content spam the holy hell out of the Internet"
How? (In what way would you go about doing that?)
For all I know any or all of these tactics could currently be the search engine kiss of death - so don't do any of them without doing your research first. Search engines have probably gotten a wee bit smarter.
The other, more ethical way to do it is to produce great content (reviews, tutorials, photo shoots, etc.) that people might actually want to link to of their own free will, but this is time-consuming and hard to scale up.
As people may notice, there are some issues with the dimensions search. For instance: how do you differentiate between width/height/depth when there is no real "front" of the product. The dimensions depend on the orientation the user expects, not necessarily what is stored in the DB.
These are both issues I hope to fix, but at the moment I still think it performs fairly well. (and will improve)
Recently I can think of this happening to me for video cameras, regular camera, honeymoon spots, projectors, health insurance, apartments, outdoor camping gear, etc. Flight & hotel search has made real progress in the last couple years here but there's still tons of opportunity.
I can't say this category of items is super important to me, but I certainly welcome the idea of making purchasing anything online smarter/easier. With so many affiliate programs out there they should also lead to decent/good businesses.
Make the price adjuster control move in increments of at least $10 (maybe $100).