App for price comparison

Questions
1

My idea is pretty simple: I want to build an app similar to PriceRunner and other price comparison websites. The difference with my idea is that I want to make price comparisons between second hand/customer-to-customer websites. For example; I want to buy a new smartphone, but I can’t afford a brand new phone, so I will buy a pre-owned phone. I start looking around at maybe Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, etc. It takes a lot of time. So what I want is an app/website which collects data from all those websites and shows me the cheapest phone for sale right now.

So my questions are: Is it even possible to build an automated data collection that collects products and prices from different marketplaces like I mentioned? How would one go about with this? I mean is there any templates for this or so? I struggle to come up with an idea that would solve the data collection issue.

I’m sorry if my explanation is not sufficient as English is not my native language. I’m also aware that apps/websites like I just explained may exist, but not in my country. Feel free to ask questions if I need to clarify anything.

Thanks in advance

2

There are two ways you can do this:

  1. Manual web scraping (example)
    :white_check_mark: Cheaper. Pay for one service to cover all your retailers.
    :x: More difficult to implement. You need to set this up for each retailer.
  2. Use a pre-built price API (example).
    :white_check_mark: Easier to implement. You just need to connect the API to get the latest prices.
    :x: More expensive. You probably need to pay for multiple APIs to get prices from all the retailers you want.

Ed
Bubble Developer/Founder, Nalfe
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2 Likes
3

Thank you for your answer! Very helpful.

However, I still don’t understand how I will implement it with Bubble. Let’s say I choose the software. How do I connect it with bubble? Since I presume the data have to be inserted into bubble as well?

1 Like
4

You will use the API connector (a Bubble plugin) to connect to the APIs.

Assuming you have thousands of products on your website, it doesn’t make sense to keep calling those APIs every 30 minutes. That would be ten of thousand of calls per day.
Instead you can call the APIs for a particular product when the pricing information is needed, like when a user visits a product page.