Any suggestion will be apprieciated.
I want to write a CD price compare script. It should be able to go to different CD shopping sites and collect the prices for a particular CD and save in a database. Visitor come over and get the price comparision of that CD from several different web site. Just something like pricegrabber.com.

The hard thing to me is to find a unique id can apply to all the websites. Do I have to be a partner of those sites before I can make a script like this?

Please, any suggestion?

Zee

Read the documentation at ecommercetimes.com. Some of the articles may provide a good frame of reference. Extracting data from other sources without their approval (or crediting them) and for commercial purposes will get you in hot water (trouble).

Regards,

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Eliot Lee....
Former Handle: Eliot
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Thanks for the reply. I will check the website. Of course I won't extract the data from other sites without asking. My plan is: go to sign up the affiliate program of those sites. But I still have no idea how to find some unique id for a CD and I can extract data of a CD from different websites by using that id.

Any more ideas?

What do you mean by "id"?

Regards,

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Eliot Lee....
Former Handle: Eliot
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Well what I meant was something like ISBN # for books or Manufacturer Part # for computer parts. I assume all sites use this kind of number for CDs and I can use it as a search keyword and extract the information. This may be a dumb idea, but I just can't think of anything else.

Please give me something more, thank you.

I would doubt that online sites use that number. Internal, their inventory computers use the bar code numbers to identify product for ordering etc, but my guess would be that to the web customer, it would be like a database id#, not product number.

--mark

So are you saying I can't search a CD on different websites by using the same keyword? That's sad. Then I will have to setup a keyword for each website to get info for just one CD! That's hell a lot of work: search for 100 CDs from 10 websites, and I need 100 x 10 = 1000 keywords or id# ??!! It will be a large database by itself.

Mmm, any other idea?

zjs2k,

Why don't you just simply search a few sites yourself and see if you can come up with a common search term or "unique ID" for each CD that you wish to compare on your site? Have you thought about.... the title or the artist??

Domenic, you got a good point here. I tried to find some numbers like the ISBN for the books, but I got nothing. Those sites, such as Amazon and CDNow, all use different numbering system. Search the artist and title maybe a good way, but I can't guarantee it is unique (may return multiple search results). And no search result may not mean there is no such CD on the site.

What I am saying here is: ISBN # is guaranteed unique for book. I find the number then I get the book. If I can't find it, there is no such book. I assume I have to write the script from scratch, so I want the design is good from the beginning.

(sigh) Seems this isn't a quite feasible plan to go with ??!!

Yeah, I hear ya! I'm not sure what an ISBN# is, but my guess would be that your probably gonna have a hard time trying to match a univeral #. But, who knows I could be wrong. I sell products also, and purposely use different product #'s when adding them. I think mainly for comparison shopping.....but anyway, it was just a thought!

Good Luck

Does this mean you know of a good Book comparison search? I would love to get hold of this!

Ben

You can find a list of several these kind of sites on Yahoo:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Books/Shopping_and_Services/Book_Search_Services/Price_Comparisons/

I can't say which is good, which is bad, because I didn't try all of them. Some of them are pretty nice. If anybody have any idea about how they did it, please post it here. When I said "any idea", I meant it :-)

Thank you all for your replies.

[This message has been edited by zjs2k (edited March 30, 2000).]