On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Harvey Kane <[email protected]> wrote:
> Chris Hope wrote: > > > > I think given the prominence of Pricespy they're able to now demand a > > feed rather than bothering with screen scraping, but I think if Joe > > Bloggs went along and started demanding feeds from people with their > > start up website they'd be told to sod off :) > > > > > As a side note, the staff at PriceSpy have been pretty cool to deal > with. I got a thorough response straight away when I asked for > clarification on the data format, although it looks like they are pretty > accommodating about how they receive your data. eg "Here's the data > format. Feel free to adhere to it, or not. Or just make up your own > names for the fields and we'll read it anyway. Or if that all sounds too > hard, we can just scrape your site and get the data that way." > > <disclaimer>the above is not a direct quote, but that was the gist of > it</disclaimer> > > They are big enough now to be able to ask for a feed, but still small > enough to be polite about it. > > Quotes from http://pricespy.co.nz/info.php?t=for_stores_index "If it is not possible to provide us with a product feed, we can probably retrieve the prices anyway." "An example of a (semicolon separated) product feed can be found here. You can use this as a template if you wish, but there are no requirements that you use the same order and names of columns as in this feed. Contact Us if you have questions." They *ask* for a feed but are prepared to fall back on screen scraping, They do have some hard and fast requirements, but those are about things like being NZ GST registered, providing support in English, etc. This isn't to say that they would be quick about working out how to accurately import some random format, just that they are still prepared to do it. -- Bruce Clement Home: http://www.clement.co.nz/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/Bruce_Clement "Before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field." Mikhail Kalashnikov -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
