Merging Datafeeds

maybe wrong forum...

[vabtz]

I am setting up my first price comparison site ( yeah real original I know ).

I have several datafeeds but every manufacturer uses their own system to list the products. Anyone have advice on how to merge the feeds so I would be able to identify products that our the same.

The best method I have currently is to find similiar sounding items and manually verify which ones are the same product.

[WSQuant]

It really depends on what your comparing as to whether its original or not, right?

Grab 30 different packs of gum and a stop watch and see who's flavor lasts the longest. Then write your comparison site.

I'll bet money there isn't a site like that yet, there's your originality.

[vabtz]

thanks.

what about that pesky merging datafeeds question though?

lol

[Nefig]

I'd sort them by SKU number or something like that - it's supposed to be sort of unique identificator of the product (or so I heard), and then pick the merchant with best description fields and for each product I'd only take prices of other competing merchants in the same format. The idea here would be to have one good, clean, complete datafeed and work with it, and pick prices from other feeds based on SKU# field or any other matching field which can ultimately identify the product...

Not a rocket science imho, but cleaning feeds and preparing them may be quite a headache and lots of manual work... Hope this helps; sorry if my English is not 100% good :)

By the way I'm looking right now for tools to work with datafeeds, if there are any - sticky me, plz :) I don't mean Webmerge, but some small pieces of software to optimize them.

[vabtz]

Yeah I am going to key tem on SKU

Unfortunately they all use there own internal SKU numbers. So what I am left with is manually merging them and throwing the SKU's in a lookup table that references what the product actually is.

I have heard that UPC is a unique code to a manufacturer but none of the feeds I have include that.

I can only automate that partially.

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As far as tools are concerned I am writing my own via PHP / MySQL. Sorry wish I had something to help you on that.

[roldar]

I like to use a text editor with regex capabilities to prepare the file, then insert it in a database and manipulate things from there using custom php.

[vabtz]

Thanks roldar

Thats effectively what I ended up doing.
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The hardest thing so far was making my own "feed" by scrapping own of my merchants site cause they won't give me a proper feed.