auto adjustment of prices

[loft]

Hello, I new to this forum.

First of all I need to say "sorry for my bad English". If anybody doesn't understand the content, please let me know.

[u]To the Topic:[/u]

We operate an online store selling RC-toys and spare parts. 98% of the goods we sell are made and purchased in China. A common problem is the procurement of spare parts. Over a certain period of time the manufacturer cannot provide several spare parts (they are sold out). Retailer cannot provide spare parts to their customers.

In the country I am living I am required to stockpile spare parts for min. 2 years. This means I need to ensure to have the parts in stock, at any time!

When the manufacturer cannot provide a spare part, it will take 4-6 weeks until every retailers stock becomes zero.

Currenty we have no control over the market situation.

I am looking for a tool to read the competitors webshops, as follows:
- Stock (in stock / out of stock)
- Price

These information helps our business as follows:
- based on availability and price of the competitor we can adjust our price and make more profit
- based on the shrinking stock of competitors we can stockpile parts until the manufacturer is able to deliver
- a high percentage of available parts leads to more sales

Thanks for reading and replying

Best,
loft

[RedHelper]

Great idea, to my regret i can't suggest anything right now, but we can create a program solution of such type bearing your idea in mind...

BTW sorry for my English as well)

[loft]

Hello and thanks for your reply.

I found a solution working like Amazon, too big, too powerful and too expensive.

The software analyzes a lot of factors:
- prices of competitors
- Number of sales and the developement of sales
- my stock (low stock = the price go up; big stock = the price go down)

The algorithm ensures the highest profit margin while adjusting prices full automatic.

But the software doesn't analyze the "competitors Availability" !


Another question:

Where can I find a tool to read the "source code"?

I use a Macro to read the source code from competitors. It takes 10 seconds to read 1 single product from 1 website.

10.000 products 5 competitors = 140 hours work (for 1 working PC).

Unfortunately my macro has a high fault tolerance.

But I need a tool where I can save the link and tell the software the position in the source code.

[loft]

Hello there,

since this topic is left unanswered I would like to finally answer my own question "Where can I find a tool to read the "source code"? "

I finally found a couple of so called "web / screen scraping" tools that do what I need:

- Mechanize (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- Nokigiri (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- Hpricot (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- ScrAPI (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- Rubyful-soup (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- ARIEL (not tested yet)
- Scrapy (Python based and very powerful, tested and works)
- prudsys (sounded very promising, but very expensive and some powerful features I don't use/need, not tested yet)
- scRUBYt (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- Anemone (Ruby based; not tested yet because I habe no Ruby knowledge)
- mozenda (very easy to use, but I miss some functions)
- uBot (very easy to use, but I miss some functions, tested the demo version, but I will not update to the full version)
- Google Docs (supports 50 ImportXml functions only, useless)
- 80legs (80app) (very easy to use, but I miss some functions)
- 30digits (Web Extractor) (very easy to use, but I miss some functions)
- my own PHP-crawling script (works great but it's not finished yet, the script should save the item into a SQL database)

"use the right tool for the right job!" so I need more time to test them all, my recent favorite is Scrapy btw!

Thanks for reading

[edited by: lorax at 2:49 pm (utc) on Nov 28, 2011]