This seems like prime territory for a Mac menu bar / Windows system tray app that runs this process once a day.
Why would it need a visible UI component? Just put it in a cron job
Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
11–20 of 148 posts
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#12Next time you are at the store look at the circular. There is a barcode you can scan with their app that adds everything to you app that week.
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is so true. Even if your algorithm works it's a human factor that breaks it.
Never underestimate the error introduced by a lack of incentive for humans to comply with the API (or the API itself being human-hostile). My favorite example is the Domino's "Your pizza is ready" signal. Since the data feeding the signal also feeds the store's performance analysis (i.e. they track how fast employees are getting pizzas ready), there's significant incentive for employees to lie to the algorithm and hi…
> there's significant incentive for employees to lie to the algorithm and hit "It's ready" before it's physically ready
It's the same with fast food in general. One of my first jobs was at a McDonald's where the standard practice was to hit the 'finished' button for any order that was taking 'too long', at which point the people doing food prep would have to keep track of a sequence of three or four orders in their head. As you can imagine, errors were constant, but customer satisfaction was less important to management than satisfying this imaginary metric.
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#14Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#15Haha, I did something similar a while ago - I just invoked a click() on every "add coupon" button on their website, I didn't want to reverse engineer their APIs - way easier but also it requires a desktop browser with the page open. I'm not sure if using this API is any different but a few months ago Safeway made a change that only lets you have 20(?) coupons at any time. After you add more it kicks off your oldest o…
You can use Selenium to do the same thing in a headless browser, no need for a desktop browser with a page open.
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#16This is the kind of stuff where I tell people that coding can be a real practical skill (that gives you an unfair advantage these days). I did something similar (read-only) for Home Depot Truck Rentals. To check if the truck was available at my local store, each time, you had to put in your zip code, and click a couple of times. Once I found that was an API, I rebuilt the call in Postman and kept hitting that endpoin…
Future of this: computer vision detector on top of frequently-updated satellite data?
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#17When I see access to private API's like this, I wonder how judges would interpret these actions as they relate to the CFAA. By accessing "private" API's like this, are you knowingly accessing a computer without authorization? Are you exceeding your authorized access?
The fact that Aaron's Law never went through has disturbed me...
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#18This is the kind of stuff where I tell people that coding can be a real practical skill (that gives you an unfair advantage these days). I did something similar (read-only) for Home Depot Truck Rentals. To check if the truck was available at my local store, each time, you had to put in your zip code, and click a couple of times. Once I found that was an API, I rebuilt the call in Postman and kept hitting that endpoin…
Future of this: computer vision detector on top of frequently-updated satellite data?
Bonus points if you implement it with your own remote controlled drone.
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#19This is cool but I'm not sure the purpose. I use the Safeway app every time I go to Safeway. I scan all the offers and just add the ones I want, which builds a shopping list for me.
This gives me a list of things to buy but more importantly I know what's on sale. If I just added all the coupons
I'd still have to scan the list of things to find what I want to buy, but then I'd have to track them elsewhere, because the built in list would be useless.
Safeway actually made a decent app that helps me shop faster. This feels like it would ruin that.
Re: Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
#20Another tip: (area code) 867-5309 works for Safeway club card discounts in most area codes while piping tracking of your purchases to essentially null. Yes, Jenny’s number.
I use this one when I'm traveling. It almost always works.