Buying a bot

Can you buy price robots off the shelf?

[barryflynn]

Excuse this question if it seems incredibly naive, but I'm a newbie, and not a programmer of any kind.

I run a site that carries news and listings about a particular kind of product, with links to merchants offering the best price at any one time. I get revenues from Google Adsense, plus income from various affiliate programs for leads and commissions on sales.

Currently, I research product prices manually for my site - i.e. I regularly (well, reasonably regularly!) go round all the online merchants selling this type of product, looking at their prices. I then post the lowest one I can find for that product.

Trouble is, it's incredibly time-consuming. Is there any way I can purchase software to automate the process? Obviously, there are shopping engines that could do this for me (kelkoo and pricerunner are the two main ones I'm aware of in the UK), but they don't cover enough merchants (or the right range of merchants) to give a good result.

Any suggestions gratefully received....

[ecommerce man]

Don't know of one off the shelf. If there is such a thing it would have to be able to decipher all page layouts of all sites.

Your probably looking at custom programming to allow you to do this. You would then need a different script or routine for each site. You may alos have to change th programming if the site layout changes.

[ziggystardust]

I basically agree with ecommerce_man... I've never seen a bot for sale.

A bot that checks prices isn't too hard to write if you decide to do it "yourself" (ie. hire a programmer).

What you need is something quite simple:
¤ check site X for the lastes prices and add it to your database.
¤ notify you if site X changes layout or goes down and the code needs updating.
¤ allow future shops to be added easily.

That's pretty much it.

Good luck
//ZS

[BlueSky]

There are actually free open source bots which will crawl and retrieve individual pages or entire sites if you want. These bots however do not process the data collected. Like the other two said here, you would need a custom-built program to do this. You may need to keep a relationship with the programmer to tweak the code since many people change their pages' formats over time. Some of these sites may end up banning your bot/IP if it misbehaves or they just don't like it.

[MonkeyBoyUK]

Wouldnt you perhaps be better off making arrangements with the sites you recomend?
They can keep you updated with their prices in return for you supplying them with leads/sales. Im sure if you are sending a lot of business their way, they will do all they can to accomodate your needs.

[barryflynn]

Thanks for your replies, guys.
I'm beginning to think MonkeyBoyUK is right. It might be simpler to enter into relationships with the online merchants (that's presumably what the likes of Kelkoo do).
However, since I intend to post only the cheapest price I find on a particular day or week for a particular model, it's not always going to be in their interests to co-operate, is it? Particularly if they tend to be more expensive than all the others and I always send people somewhere else!

[killroy]

It can be VERY simple really.

A line of code (in jsut about any scripting language)

For each merchant to retrive the site, and nother line wit ha regex extracting the price.

As long as you check the same merchants over and over, and don't need specific layout change notification (i.e. regulraly check that the prices are indeed numbers and nort garbled), a tiny <30 lines script could do the job.

SN