Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

priceperball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#11

Post by Propelloni »

rockdiesel wrote: post #7
litenboll wrote: post #5

Great idea, simple and effective. Tiny bit of feedback: seems like some listings use "unit count" for the number of balls, look at the most expensive listing for an example. Annoyingly the second most expensive balls have the number of dozens in the unit count instead.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to combat these inconsistencies. Right now, I have some manual overrides, but not sure it's sustainable to keep manually overriding inconsistent listings. Any thoughts? Should I default to what's in the product title instead of the unit count? Not sure the best way to combat this.

Maybe you could build a heuristic around shipping weight? A single golf ball weighs about 45 to 50 g, so divide the shipping weight by, say, 50 g to account for boxing and so on and you get a rough estimate of the balls in the package.

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#12

Post by rockdiesel »

jmux wrote: post #9

Great idea, i love the simple html website :) For determining the number of balls, i had an idea but not sure of how well it’d fit in. Could you feed the listing title, unit count, and description into an LLM with a basic “figure out how many balls are in this listing and make sure that number makes sense with the price” prefix prompt and then store that number with the ASIN? One LLM call per product should be pretty…

Before going full AI, maybe I could create a list of quantity keywords like "dozen", "3-pack", etc... and at least use that as a starting point.

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#13

Post by rockdiesel »

jasoncartwright wrote: post #3

Came here to comment how much it's like the superb diskprices.com. Excellent work.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I love that site and always sat around thinking about building something like it, but for a product I buy frequently. And I finally built it.

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#14

Post by fru2013 »

rockdiesel wrote: post #8
smokedetector1 wrote: post #4

Somethings broken - the most expensive ball, "TaylorMade 2021 TP5x (3+1 Box) 4DZ" is listed as $169.95 for 1 ball. Clicking through, this is actually for 4 dozen balls, making the actual per ball $3.54

Posting my other comment from above: Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to combat these inconsistencies. Right now, I have some manual overrides, but not sure it's sustainable to keep manually overriding inconsistent listings. Any thoughts? Should I default to what's in the product title instead of the unit count? Not sure the best way to combat this.

ChatGPT was able to tell that there were 48 balls given only the URL...

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#15

Post by sagacity »

rockdiesel wrote: post #12
jmux wrote: post #9

Great idea, i love the simple html website :) For determining the number of balls, i had an idea but not sure of how well it’d fit in. Could you feed the listing title, unit count, and description into an LLM with a basic “figure out how many balls are in this listing and make sure that number makes sense with the price” prefix prompt and then store that number with the ASIN? One LLM call per product should be pretty…

Before going full AI, maybe I could create a list of quantity keywords like "dozen", "3-pack", etc... and at least use that as a starting point.

Alternatively, make your site so popular that manufacturers tune their description to work with your site :)

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#16

Post by rockdiesel »

Propelloni wrote: post #11
rockdiesel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to combat these inconsistencies. Right now, I have some manual overrides, but not sure it's sustainable to keep manually overriding inconsistent listings. Any thoughts? Should I default to what's in the product title instead of the unit count? Not sure the best way to combat this.

Maybe you could build a heuristic around shipping weight? A single golf ball weighs about 45 to 50 g, so divide the shipping weight by, say, 50 g to account for boxing and so on and you get a rough estimate of the balls in the package.

O wow, that's an interesting approach. That would've never crossed my mind without posting this on HN. Appreciate the suggestion.

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#18

Post by tonygrue »

rockdiesel wrote: post #7
litenboll wrote: post #5

Great idea, simple and effective. Tiny bit of feedback: seems like some listings use "unit count" for the number of balls, look at the most expensive listing for an example. Annoyingly the second most expensive balls have the number of dozens in the unit count instead.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to combat these inconsistencies. Right now, I have some manual overrides, but not sure it's sustainable to keep manually overriding inconsistent listings. Any thoughts? Should I default to what's in the product title instead of the unit count? Not sure the best way to combat this.

You could make a list of all the metadata and pass it through a LLM to determine the quantity. You’ll need some sanity checking but if you prompt it with some examples it will do well. (Done something very similar myself.)

Re: Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

#20

Post by hluska »

rockdiesel wrote: post #7
litenboll wrote: post #5

Great idea, simple and effective. Tiny bit of feedback: seems like some listings use "unit count" for the number of balls, look at the most expensive listing for an example. Annoyingly the second most expensive balls have the number of dozens in the unit count instead.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to combat these inconsistencies. Right now, I have some manual overrides, but not sure it's sustainable to keep manually overriding inconsistent listings. Any thoughts? Should I default to what's in the product title instead of the unit count? Not sure the best way to combat this.

I’m not the person you replied to but I took a look at the data and this is an interesting one. You found a really cool data set and this will be fun.

Consider the top four most expensive golf balls on your current list:

TaylorMade 2021 TP5x (3+1 Box) 4DZ Golf Ball Pack, White — uses 4DZ in title, 48.0 in unit count in product specs.

Bridgestone Golf Tour B RXS Quadfecta - nothing in the title, unit count in product specs is 4.0. This one shows 4 dozen in a different spot than other balls.

TaylorMade Golf 2024 TP5 Golf Balls 3+1 Box Four Dozen — Four dozen in the title, unit count in product specs is 1.0 but it has 4.0 dozen in the same div as the Bridgestone balls.

Srixon Z Star Yellow Golf Balls - Buy 2 DZ Get 1 DZ Free — Title shows buy 2 DZ get 1 free. That’s represented as 2+1 or 3+1 in other data. In product specs it shows a unit count of 1.0.

— In that extremely limited sample, the product weight is a pretty good metric to show that the unit count is flawed though that only works in comparison to others. I wonder if you could do a multi pass approach, where you sort data first and then do a unit count versus weight check to find outliers and then start rocking through the titles? You’ll still end up digging through a lot of edge cases and that won’t be much fun but a multi pass would at least give you some insight into those weird edge cases.

Post reply on HN