No worries - to answer your questions:
- We don't actually sell the products, we are a shopping comparison engine (still getting started). We work off both affiliate and direct advertising models.
- In an effort to get more products listed for users we mass imported about a 2000 or so last week from different companies. They don't have specifications set for them yet to search (ex caliber, barrel length, etc). These specifications are typically not offered by retailers as part of the data we receive from them so we have to go in and set this. We don't actually aggregate results like a crawler, it's really more of product data feeds.
- It's a rarity if the picture does not represent the product itself. However, sometimes online dealers use stock pictures from the manufacturer even if they are selling the same model but different configuration ... sometimes they have disclaimers warning you it is a stock photo or "not the exact product".
- We are nearing 10,000 products with more to come. 10-15% is an estimate. I can't begin to tell you how many bad links suppliers and data feeds sometimes have this happens in traditional shopping comparison sites as well, although they are big enough and have enough backing to get a handle on it. Some have stock numbers some don't. Brownells will have stock numbers while "Joes Online Gunshop" for example won't have much to work with except description, title, price, etc. Until we hammer out the inventory, the best we can do is eliminate as many out of stock as possible - however you also never know when it may be in stock. Sometimes it's listed as out of stock for only a week. No matter what, the supplier still wants you to come to his site.
As for the model, in the shopping comparison world (which I'm trying our best to modify for the gun industry) they run off several models. The reason for this is to accomodate different sized retailers. Some may use Pay Per Click (we are working on this), others just use fixed price listings, while others may use pay per sale, and some may just use impressions of products). They really have a number of ways to accommodate different sized businesses.
To start with we have affiliate listings and fixed listings. Fixed listings is just a yearly subscriber fee based on the number of products a supplier wants to add. Each listing plan includes featured listings which help display rank toward the top of a search. Even if they have 250 products, but only want to add 25 of their top sellers, there is a plan for that.
It's kind of chicken before the egg - you're not going to have people coming to the site if there is not enough product. Alternatively no one is going to advertise with you directly (yet) if you don't have the traffic to justify it. Hence we have to start somewhere. We've already seen revenue from affiliate sales (a small start). As we add more product, gain more traffic, we'll be able to offer alternatives besides fixed price listings. Regardless, we're open to ideas.
