Price Parser

Currently, for different online retail sites, we hard coded the html tags that the parser should look for to get product information. For the whole term, I have been wondering if there is a better way to do it. Once the sites change their UI design, we'll have to change our code. After doing research online and talk to different people, I think that's just the nature of the html parsing. Other than using the retail site's API (if it exists), hard coding the parsing info seems to be the correct way to use! 

Last Few Updates

As the deadline nears, here are a few other additional features that we added since the Demo Day.

• Give user an option to choose when to stop notifying them by
• There is a widget where the user selects when they want to stop tracking the item
• Default is None
• Show a list of the same item but from different stores
• This is useful for users who are curious where they can find the same item but cheaper

Latest Product Page:

Current Logo

After many weeks, we have decided on the following logo for now:

Demo Day + More Updates

Demo Day

Despite not making the Top 3, Demo Day went pleasantly well on Thursday. We received plenty of compliments and several people gave us their email once we finalize our website. As it turns out, everyone shops online and has at one point in their life wished they could be automatically notified about price drops. They also liked the simplicity of our website and ease of use. One person, who owns an Italian website in charge of notifying users of coupons for stores, offered to talk to us about a potential partnership. Interesting.

In addition to compliments, we got several constructive criticisms that we will consider implementing in the near future:
- Giving users an option to set a day to stop notifying them by
- In the item details page, show a list of the same item in competitive stores and their prices
- Taking advantage of Amazon's Recommendation items
- Prettify the price history in graph form


Mini-Updates
- Added track/untrack buttons
- Notification emails contain information about item drop (such as new price) and contains link to send users to the actual website

SAMPLE EMAIL

FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS:
- Same as the last post plus the suggestions made by people from Demo Day
- Perhaps create a history page of user's past tracked items.
- Create a button for users saying that they purchased that item

• After a purchase, we still want to track that item for a certain time because some stores have a Buy Back policy

Long-term goal: Develop a store credit system similar to Ebay where buying through our website gives users store credit to buy other products. Must be partnered with other companies to work

Update So Far

As the demo day nears, here are some of the things we've accomplished recently and hope to accomplish in the near future:

Added a detailed products page for each item

• Clicking on an item sends user to a page showing details about that item
• Displays item information
• Displays price history
• Displays recommendations

Added tags to each item for our recommendation system

• Currently uses product names for tags
• Recommendations then uses those tags to decide which items to recommend
• Clicking on a tag lists all items with the same tag

Incorporate price history

• Display date and price in list form

Add commenting system

• Users can comment on a specific item for everyone to view

Added a few more links on each page so user can more easily navigate website

Agreed upon a logo

FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS

• Research smarter recommendation algorithms
• Graphically display price history
• Visually enhance each page
• Give more options to users
• Add track/untrack buttons
• Make emails more meaningful
• In addition to recommendations page, possibly add a "Users who track this item also track..." section

Week 6 Update

Successfully deployed on Fastsoft's EC2

• http://131.215.221.146/mypage/
• Incorporated Lucia's css designs

CURRENT WELCOME PAGE

List of tasks still to be done:

• Work on sending email confirmations
• Redesign user home page to include more functionality
• Site map
• If enough time, work on graphs and displaying statistics
• Register domain name

Week 5 Update

In addition to the progress as described by the posts below...

Created a user's My Page with the following features
1. Entering a product url to be tracked can now be done from the homepage
2. Lists all currently watched items
   i. Each item has current price, store name, id, picture, and last price change

CURRENT MY PAGE