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Working on a tool to help consumers find products / watch for price drops that match their budget for a very specific industry. Think camelcamelcamel with pric
by flutas 4y ago
Working on a tool to help consumers find products / watch for price drops that match their budget for a very specific industry.
Think camelcamelcamel with price charts (and other aspects of the products) tracked over time and Google Shopping so you can compare the same product among stores.
Hoping to get the MVP out this month, been tracking data heavily since ~last September and currently have ~150k data points across about 37k products in 32 stores.
Biggest problem I'm having right now is matching up products across stores, since each store can name their products differently, some like to add random text to the titles "NEW!!!!", and data points don't always match up due to the batch based aspect of the products. I have a very basic matching system working, enough to extract (some of) the needed metadata from products and roughly match the products.
Current version is good enough for the MVP launch, mostly just working on cleanup / UI work right now before it goes out.
- scottmcdot 4y agoYou should check out pricehipster.com. It was really good until companies started making it difficult to maintain a data feed.
- flutas 4y agoLooks interesting and almost the exact same idea, just a different industry. I am worried about the data feed aspects, the stores aren't exactly going to enjoy this, since they are the ones making the majority of the profit in this situation (my brother works at a manufacturer on the other side of this, so I know roughly the margins involved). I understand it though, who would enjoy something like this coming out when your price for a product can go from $45 to $9 in a day and you're still making profit off of it... ex of actual data: https://i.imgur.com/jYUDriD.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jYUDriD.jpg
- scottmcdot 4y agoI noticed that Price Hipster had affiliate codes in the URLs. Perhaps that's something you can do to win over the stores? E.g. justify their data feed with affiliate tracking volume.
- pocketarc 4y agoIf you end up having problems with the data feeds I suppose scraping might always be an option. If your system can show price drops that dramatic, it’d definitely be worth it, even if it’d be more of a maintenance commitment. Good luck, I hope it all works out!
- sushilchoudhari 4y agoScandid.in is a shopping assistant with features like price alerts. We have entity based product matching which works for 98% of times across 25m products. Would love to give some inputs/help out if possibble, ping me if you are interested.