Is it possible to find the working method of a website?

Hi all,

To be honest, I am quite irritated right now because I am not able to find the working method of an affiliate website. I am a marketer and I know html, wordpress and bit of other things, but I am not a programmer. My client asked me to check a website and work with him to create something similar. The site is thuttu dot com (sorry, can't put the domain link)

Now, when I looked at this website, I am not even able to understand a slight bit of it. I am quite sure that they are not updating the website manually, but how they are making it automated is far beyond my understanding. They are putting updates in every 5-7 minutes, not just 1 update, lot of updates round the clock. And, that is also from many websites.

Experts here might be able to help a bit, I have no other way to find this out.

Any kind of info would be helpful. Like, what kind of tech they might be using, are they using api's of big sites like amazon, ebay etc... in a particular way or they are just picking the data with scripts? I mean, I have to tell the client that what they are doing and what we should do to make something similar... etc..?

Kindly help guys... I will be very thankful...

 

Probably scraping through a whole bunch of other sites + APIs where available. After that just parsing and choosing what info to display

 

Thanks for your reply Sarah. I was not able to understand this concept because I am not a developer, just know marketing stuff. You are right, they must be picking certain type of items available at certain discount. But, I am not able to understand that how they are doing this for the websites with no api or rss available? Some of the websites from where they are pulling the deals do not have api or rss, those websites only provide banners for promotion purposes. Are they doing website scrapping for that? Because if they doing scrapping, then putting affiliate link will be difficult or may be impossible, isn't it?

Please correct me if I am wrong. I am not even near to your expertise in doing and understanding these things. But yes, learning every day with the help of experts like you

 

Yes, you are right. They must be using api or may be scrapping. But, some of the websites from where they are pulling the deals do not have api or rss, those websites only provide banners for promotion purposes. If they doing scrapping, then putting affiliate link will be difficult or may be impossible, isn't it?

 

Some APIs may not be available to public.

 

You are right, that could be the case. And, is it possible to do this with scraping? I think it is not possible to put an affiliate link when you use scraping. Is that so?

 

That depends really, some sites offer global affiliates where you can just add in your referal ID. Can't say for certain without knowing the sites, you should do some research on those sites, or possibly just contact customer support and ask. Most sites are more than happy to oblige.

 

Thanks, this solved my doubt about scraping.