Hey all,
I am currently working on a website that will allow you to monitor websites for changes. This could be anything from alerting you when a recent bargain comes back in stock or a product you've been eyeing for a while comes on sale.
I would like to ask if you would find any value in this tool and if so what features you would like to see?
From my understanding Price Hipster only works with sites they support. This will work for essentially any site, and isn't limited to just traditional products, for example, it could work for concert tickets being released.
How can it possibly work for any site? If you don't have access to their API I assume you're going to be screen scraping which is a big no-no in a lot of usage T&C's.
Google and other search engines value is dependent on scraping. For the most part, the tool will be used to allow users to buy things from the site (ie. Give money to the website owner).
@coyney: Look at the Myers T&C
you may not use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor, copy or scrape any of our web pages or the content contained herein
You need to get express permission to scrape their website which will be the case for most sites. This is why Pricehipster only has a list of select sites… they need permission.
@Ryanek:
I couldn't find anything on Myer's T&C's https://m.myer.com.au/c/online-shopping/online-shopping-term… - I understand where you're coming from though.
I couldn't find anything
That's because you looked in the wrong spot: https://m.myer.com.au/resources/156c810d-a088-4c37-9942-ab54…
Scraping will get your IP address blocked. And no, "…but if I use lots of computers and do it slowly…" won't work either.
And the answer to your next question is in the link, even if it doesn't say it bluntly.
Ah I see what you mean now. So sorta like comparing the page between now and later. How will you be preventing false alerts eg. website layout change, pages with timestamp etc.?
But yea, sounds like a good idea.
You will be able to select the section of the page that you care about. So if you only care about the price displayed we will only notify you if that changes and not if something else does.
Most services like yours are rather expensive, how do you plan to make money?
A freemium model. Free accounts will have a limited amount of websites they can monitor and limited frequency, whilst paying users will be able to monitor more sites with faster alerts.
So many questions .. What is the checking intervals? If you have 1000 people interested in 1000 different items from JB Hifi - do you bombard JBHifi with 1000 requests * checking intervals? How do you ensure your server is not blacklisted? How do you deal with product variations ( ie shoe size/color/currency)? How long are you storing the results?
Checking intervals are looking to be every 10 minutes, hour, day. Requests will be spread out to reduce the load on both the sending and receiving end. Proxies/multiple servers. Depends on how the site is configured, I've tried it on product variations on eBay and it works. 6 months for free users, longer for paid.
Requests will be spread out to reduce the load on both the sending and receiving end - Proxies/multiple servers
That will cost you lots of money and you will constantly play cat and mouse with site operators.
Some operator doesn't straight reject your request but serve '200 OK' page with different content.6 months for free users, longer for paid
What stopping user to re-register the monitor ?
You said that it will work with any site - so lets say I want to monitor this :
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Lenovo-P8-8-0-inch-Tablet-PC…
If your site can do this kind of alerting easily then I would use it.
App called web alert is what I use to monitor change in price. Works great.
You select what you want to monitor and when it changes I get an alert. Can set checking intervals……
You mean like Price Hipster?