Price comparison shopping API

Discussions
#1

I am planning to work on iOS App that will display price comparison data upon scanning an item bar code. I have been searching on internet, looked all over ProgrammableWeb site for APIs, but could not find any thing useful. I could not find any WebSErvice API, that would return price comparison data in lets say JSON format for a given UPC bard code or any other input.

Does such a thing exist? If it does, I surely am unable to find it.

If this does not exist may be I should create such an API which look like a huge task.

I look forward to your feedback.

#2

Hi Faisal

I can’t help with an existing API but I’d strongly recommend that you spend some time looking at existing shopping comparison sites. You’ll quickly discover that most make money from CPC advertising by companies listed (a potential business model for you) and that many merchants use product feeds to exchange the information with the comparison sites (a potential way for you to get the data yourself)

Good luck.

Rich

1 Like
#3

Most of the easy sources for such data specifically restrict using their data for such purposes, the big one (of course) being Amazon.

Source, at one point I had built “Flickscan” an IOS app that would read a DVDs UPC barcode and add it to your Netflix Queue. The one surprisingly solid API I found was for BestBuy - who at least at the time had decent terms and call restrictions.

Even Redlaser (if not the industry leader, one of the first in this field) has de-emphasized their Product comparisons in favor of finding local retailers:

http://redlaser.com/application/

Good Luck,

Mike

1 Like
#4

If you want to build your own database then a possible source of data is affiliate networks with retailers. There’s a good chance they’ve got product feeds. As a side benefit they’ll also be able to provide you links that allow you to monetize any traffic you generate.

1 Like
#5

If you want to access india’s online sites data, try price comparison api by PriceTree. Here is the link and docuemtnation.
See video tour also : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEpHQNt_R2Y

#6

I’ve been out of this space for a bit but at the time the best publicly available API was https://www.semantics3.com. They get a lot of feeds, scrape a lot of data, and do a lot of matching and the results were pretty good. I think you can use their links with your own affiliate codes or they have a partnership with https://twotap.com to embedded purchasing.

#7

Hi Faisal,

I know you asked this a really, really long time ago, but maybe my answer will be beneficial to anyone else who comes across your question!

My company, Datafinti, has built an API that can do exactly what you need. Our Product Data API lets you query our database of 65 million+ products (and growing) with a UPC (or other identifiers) and get back a ton of information about the product.

Here’s an example API call that would do this:

https://your_token:@api.datafiniti.co/v3/data/products?q=upc:052100057125

Which will generate a response like this:

    {
        "asins": [
            "B000VDWUAY",
            "B00KO8E5JK",
            "B0009P68KM"
        ],
        "brand": "McCormick",
        "categories": [
            "Barbecue Seasoning",
            "Meat Seasoning",
            "Grocery",
            "Food"
        ],
        "dateAdded": "2015-09-13T04:42:06Z",
        "dateUpdated": "2017-04-12T13:54:07Z",
        "dimension": "3.05 in x 2.34 in x 5.75 in",
        "ean": [
            "0052100057125"
        ],
        "keys": [
            "mccormickgrillmatesmontrealsteakseasoningshaker/b000vdwuay",
            "052100057125",
            "mccormickgrillingsaucemontrealsteakseasoningbbqloverssize145ozpackof12/b00ko8e5jk",
            "mccormickgrillmatesmontrealsteakseasoning/b0009p68km",
            "superlinedeal/0005210005712",
            "mccormickgrillmatesmontrealsteakseasoning145oz/009291267",
            "0052100057125",
            "superlinedealmontrealsteakgrillmatesseasoning145oz/009291267",
            "generic/0005210005712"
        ],
        "manufacturer": "Generic",
        "manufacturerNumber": "0005210005712",
        "name": "McCormick Grill Mates Montreal Steak Seasoning Shaker",
        "prices": [
            {
                "amountMax": 9.15,
                "amountMin": 9.15,
                "currency": "USD",
                "dateAdded": "2017-04-12T13:49:02Z",
                "dateSeen": [
                    "2017-04-10T22:33:08.335Z"
                ],
                "isSale": "false",
                "merchant": "Amazon.com",
                "shipping": "USD 7.09 shipping",
                "sourceURLs": [
                    "https://www.amazon.com/McCormick-Grill-Mates-Montreal-Seasoning/dp/B0009P68KM/ref=sr_1_232_s_it/143-3782869-6447600?s=grocery&ie=UTF8&qid=1491842935&sr=1-232&keywords=McCormick"
                ]
            },
            {
                "amountMax": 6.28,
                "amountMin": 6.28,
                "condition": "new",
                "currency": "USD",
                "dateAdded": "2016-11-14T01:13:23Z",
                "dateSeen": [
                    "2016-02-01T00:00:00Z"
                ],
                "isSale": "false",
                "shipping": "FREE shipping on orders 50 +",
                "sourceURLs": [
                    "http://www.walmart.com/ip/Superline-Deal-Montreal-Steak-Grill-Mates-Seasoning-14.5-Oz/10308855"
                ]
            }
        ],
        "upc": [
            "052100057125"
        ],
        "weight": "1 pounds",
        "id": "AVpgRDUL1cnluZ0-zAZD"
    },

You can see that the data includes prices from multiple websites, which means you can provide information about a single product and get all the pricing data from around the web for it.

We have more extensive documentation available at our Developer Hub.

Hopefully this helps you or anyone else that comes across this question!