Price comparison for variable woocommerce products
. asked 4 years ago
Hello,
I wish to create a price comparison that scrapes the products stock, price and a few other data such as their "attributes" (platform, region, supported languages, various technical data) from multiple sites that do not take part in any known affiliate programs, to my variable woocommerce products.
So that when the user selects a variation, it will display only that specific variation data.
For the Buy Button I wish to choose, depending on the product, wether it is the cheapest offer, the recommended or even purchase through my own site.
The links of each data to scrape from, I wish to directly enter within the products variation and also via csv import.
An example you can see on planetkey.de or allkeyshop.com, these got several thousand products for multiple sites to compare prices from with various data being displayed.
Please also note that some sites do got products on sale, for that I would like to display the sale price aswell.
One more thing I would love to see is instead of using direct links, using something like example.com/redirect/product-name-id-of-affiliate-partner by displaying a short loading page before displaying the final affiliate url.
For the scraping I would prefer using scraperapi.com but if you got your own reliable solution I would be glad to use that aswell.
Could you please confirm me if the above mentioned features do work with your plugin and if it will be possible to update all the data every few minutes for a couple thousand products such as those sites do?
Also it would be nice to know how often you update your plugin to ensure it will always work with the newest wordpress and woocommerce.
Thank you in advance!
Dave Hilditch Staff answered 4 years ago
It doesn’t automatically display variations. It will scrape the retail price, the sale price, the images – a future upgrade will allow you to specify any part of the page you wish to scrape – e.g. description, attributes.
You don’t have to use direct links – you add the direct link only for scraping purposes then there’s a separate ‘affiliate url’. In this affiliate url you could put your actual affiliate url, or like you’re suggesting you could put your cloaked affiliate url and that would all work.
It integrates with scraperapi perfectly – that’s the 3rd party scraper we integrated into the plugin already.
I try to get updates out every couple of months. If there’s bugs, those get prioritised more quickly, features every 2 months roughly. You can see our change log for confirmation on each product page which includes the date as well as the version number for each set of changes.
. replied 4 years ago Thanks for your reply.
It seems that I have misread something because I thought it will work with variations out of the box.
For the default variant I can find a plugin on my own but to customize it to be able to enter a shortcode per variant I think I can’t do that š
Any chance that you could build this in? That would make your plugin stand a part from others cause there isn’t any single plugin that can do that but there people looking for it š
Regarding the Buy Button, adding a global option to automatically use my own stock, if quantity >=1 (or if product is marked as In Stock) and else using the cheapest affiliate, would be awesome. So if I got own products in stock, I could sell these aswell.
I am not sure how the structure within woocommerce is but I think both features shouldn’t be too difficult?
Thank you in advance!
Dave H. Staff replied 4 years ago Yes, you can choose which URL to scrape however you wish and each unique URL you scrape can have its own unique affiliate URL (or direct or cloaked URL).
It doesn’t yet work with product variations out of the box but yes, you could code this up yourself so that when a different variation is selected you could show a new shortcode specific to that variation which would include the price comparison URLs and table and affiliate URLs.
If you code that up, then you could have a default displayed on the page.
Currently, there are two options for the buy button – either keep it as set in WooCommerce, or alter the WooCommerce price and buy button to reflect the cheapest product found. I could maybe code something extra up here for you if I can understand you further – if you want that, please create a feature request.
For a demo, check out https://www.foundthru.com where you’ll find some examples. Let me know if there are other specific examples you’d like to see.
. replied 4 years ago Great to hear that! š
Just to confirm again, am I able to enter the affiliate urls of each website I wish to scrape from, per variations?
I wish to create the variable products myself, aswell upload the images on my own.
And then within each variant I wish to enter the affiliate urls of each website I wish to scrape from.
So once the user selects a variation, it should display the proper available products with their prices from various sites I wish to compare the prices from.
A default selection should be displayed when the product page without selecting a variant had been opened. If thats not built in it should work with 3rd party plugins or own coding, right?
Please also confirm me if I can choose who will be on the main “buy button”. Here I would like to select either an affiliate or my own woocommerce “Add to cart” button.
By the way, any demo/trial possible to check wether it will suit my needs?
Thank you once again!
