Price grabber script

[VijayKanta]

Hi, many of you might have gone through websites like pricegrabber, milo and groupon. I am quite an experienced PHP developer, but have failed to obtain the API of certain franchisee like American Eagle.

Is this a generic issue? I have contacted AE and others, but none respond.
Anyone knows any API to grab prices from the company websites? Or is there any other work around?

Thanks and hope the answer to this question can do benefit to others looking for similiar answer.

[bluewalrus]

Can you provide an example of what you are looking for i.e.


Load http://www.site.com/example/page1.php?asdf=1

See under ..... I want to pull ... and then .....


or is it just pull all the prices from said page(s)?

[VijayKanta]

Hi,

I am trying to create a generic app that can use a product feed in XML format from different merchant websites.

I just want to show prices from websites, as well as the product images. Upon clicking the price or image, the user is redirected to the original merchant site where he can finally do the buying and all.

I just cannot do the pulling from a particular page like your example. Is it even possible?

[bluewalrus]

file_get_contents can pull the source of pages the filtering out can become quite the process though if it's one page it could be do able. It sounds like you want to do many pages though which would be much more complicated. Do you know that AE has an API, or are you referring to sites like google checkout and shopzilla that display other sites prices on them?

[VijayKanta]

I don't know whether AE offers API. They use a feature called StoreFront which are used by merchants, not developers I assume. I contacted them twice, but no results. But it's not only AE that I want to show. Anyways thanks for providing the PHP function to get contents. It can be a good start.

Yes, it is going to be something like Google CheckOut and PriceGrabber.

[bluewalrus]

Google check out as I understand it has an api for sites that wanted to be listed http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/. I've never used price grabber a google search brought a possibly outdated link (not sure of development with pricegrabber)

http://forums.devshed.com/dev-shed-lounge-26/how-does-pricegrabber-work-377913.html

which sounds similar to google in that the merchant goes to the domain rather than a domain to the merchant.

[VijayKanta]

Thanks for the reply. It is finally do it either with PHP functions or create a portal for merchants to get listed and enter information on their products.

I hope this can be useful to others looking for similiar solutions.

[bluewalrus]

For the PHP functions I have some code that may be useful for pulling source code and filtering it down to what is needed in this thread http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57018

That code pulls a users flicker account and pulls all the images into an array. The array is then randomized and it outputs the first 4 in the random array. The problem is it only pulls the first page not all the pages the user has. I never found out why it doesn't go on to the rest of the pages someday when I get time I will return to that.