Hello People... I'm new to PHP, and I've just got a project to develop a Price Comparison Script. It's a very basic requirement. All I need is for the script to show up prices of a particular company's different products (and model numbers) from different websites. Here's an example: Let's say I want to find out the prices of HP's products from different websites. They have different kinds of products, and different models in each category. I'm required to just pull out the PRESENT pricing (in real-time) from websites like Circuit City, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. I was looking at the possibility of using data feeds, but couldn't find the data feeds anywhere, let alone try to parse it all in some PHP code. Please help me with any suggestions you may have...
I wish I could, but I just can't afford the money, nor is the kind of script that I want even available anywhere. Pricegrabber is the best that I came across, but my boss has a different set of requirements. I'm sure you might want to know why I'm dying hard to learn it: I'm here at an organisation as an intern (a compulsory requirement from the university that I study under), and have to score good marks. Needless to say, I have to keep these guys happy, for them to keep me happy Here are the complex and very custom requirements of the script, apart from what PriceGrabber.com does: 1. What my boss needs is a custom developed script, something that is not presently available in the market, as far as I could reach my (re)sources. • Requirements: o Current Listing Price of a company's products' models from 8 different e-stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. o Current Promo Price of the company's products' models from 8 different e-stores like Circuit City, Best Buy, Amazon, etc. o PriceGrabber Arithmetic Mean Market Price (PriceGrabber has its own e-store listings, and the mean required is of those values) – This means that I'll need to develop a system in a system o Number of competitors (or competing stores) in PriceGrabber – This is very difficult to develop and maintain, as another e-store can come up in the business arena anytime (and to update the same, I'll have to refresh the PriceGrabber window everyday, literally) o Lowest pricing from a major competitor in PriceGrabber – This again is pretty dynamic an element, just like the above o The updates have to be on a weekly basis 2. Some developers were of the opinion that there exists no similar script, and although some vendors might claim to develop it for like $500 or so, they will deliver nothing but a script full of bugs, which will most likely fail in different types of search queries 3. To get a good working script will cost no less than 10 times that amount and about a month or more of time. I did some search and posted questions in some developer forums (this thread actually , and a couple of other forums too) to validate their (developers') opinions and got the same responses 4. I, however, got a script that came very close to the requirements; but it doesn’t offer the flexibility of choosing the e-stores that my company wants to target on. They update their database with datafeeds (to grab information from different e-stores) on a regular basis, but there’s no assurance that they’ll get the datafeeds of the vendors my company/boss would like to get the information from. In case we want to get datafeeds on our own, that’s not even remotely possible, as most e-stores divulge such details only to closely working business/affiliate partners (or so I believe, because I did a lot of searching in the 8 e-stores I needed the datafeeds from, but couldn't find out if they were even available or not) Please post your thoughts on these points, guys... Is it possible to come up with a script like that? I mean, develop it? I'm a newbie at PHP, and don't know any other web-programming language (minus HTML... lol)...
Hotscripts, or quite possibly, no website in this world has what I need, presently. Please refer to my above post to know why. Either I say I can't do it or I have to find (and learn) a way to do it.