Hi all, I was wondering if a site like pcpartspicker.com was technically hard to develop? I mean the part of having all the products linked to retailers' databases so that the site can always show the lowest available prices. Is that very difficult to do for a good php developer? Thanks for your advice S
In Sweden we have a similar site where you can find the best deals of pretty much all the stores. Each store keeps a textfile on their server which usually has a format like "itemname;sku;price;shipping;etc;" which the site then parses and stores in their database. So basically that site can just get the contents of storename.com/pricelist.txt to get the latest prices. I configured the store I worked for to regenerate this text file whenever a product was added/updated/deleted. I am sure you could make parsers specific for some large stores in order to get your initial content. I would not consider it a very hard task but it does take some time to get right. I would prefer to use DomXpath http://php.net/manual/en/class.domxpath.php
Thanks So it's mostly a question of having access to a file (an scv file or whatever) with the updated info. Each store doesn't need to have an API?
I mean the file works sort of like a very basic api with just one request and one response. So you could ask stores to create that for you or provide access to their APIs. An API will most likely be easier than parsing the DOM and will create less of a load on their end.