'Compare products with the local market' Does anyone know how they do this?

Martin_Man

Martin_Man

Martin_Man

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Hi

Right… How can I explain this… My dad’s friend came up to me this afternoon and was wondering if it was possible I could build him a site for his shopping store. Before I said yes, there is a list of things I need to research before I do anything. One thing he would like on the site would be to have ‘compare products with the local market’ with shopping stores such as Tesco’s, Asda’s, Sainsbury's.

Example of what I mean just click the link below

http://www.tesco.com/todayattesco/pricecheck.shtml


How can I do this? And will it involve a lots of work?

Thanks
 
But you understand what I mean though? There system does it automatically but I just can't work out how though.

Looking at there site source, it looks as though they use ‘.asp’ if there is anyone familial with this? I may be completely wrong mind.
 
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It's tricky to figure out how exactly something this bespoke works. Obviously they would need to get the data from the competitors but how they do this is the difficult part. The easiest way I can think of is a database with prices that you will have to maintain. Unless there is a way to crawl a website and strip it of the required data, parse into xml and push into the db.

Certainly not something you'd want to do in your spare time.
 
This is difficult due to the supermarkets not wanting the option of comparing against competitors and possibly loosing people to them.

There's no direct access to the supermarket item-pricing system without an agreement.

I'm sorry to say this has been investigated by many people.
 
page scrapping would be one way.

Grab the page with the product on and use some php to extract the part you need and store it in a database and set it to re-scrap it every week - month - thousand years.

But it would be a LOT of work an php code.
 
Well, firstly they are either automated or manual.. but for mysupermarket.co.uk manually managing all of those prices would be insane.

But then I can't see the supermarkets willingly allow others to crawl their sites for their prices..

Not to mention the complexity of the crawler to account for the different sites setups..

I would be very interested to know how mysupermarket.co.uk works.
 
Additionally it's also not apparent what the relative quality is although for the target market of this service then it's not particularly important.
 
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