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Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

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Re: Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

#2

Post by g_h »

Having historical pricing data seems particularly interesting. I've thought about building a fashion site that predicts pricing trends so you can predict when to buy items on sale, and it seems like this could serve as the pricing infrastructure.

I wonder how I can tell what product sources are available, and whether new ones appear? I.e. is this only going to cover amazon.com, or does it know about nordstrom.com too?

Re: Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

#5

Post by govind201 »

thejosh wrote: post #3

Love the free plan, and the cheap pricing option for people who want to run this on a small scale.

The guideline behind the free plan was to provide enough calls and functionality for any developer to build, launch and maintain a moderately sized app. Shout-out aghi from Mashape for helping us with the pricing.

Re: Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

#6

Post by netvarun »

jliptzin wrote: post #4

How does this work? Is there a database of the most popular online stores and you're constantly scraping (or GETing) product data?

We aggregate data from a variety of sources (crawling, data dumps, rss feeds, and in some cases even manual curation) after which we integrate them into our data pipeline. We update them using a power law distribution, where the top 1% of best selling products (based on our internal ranking system) is updated hourly, the next 3% updated every two hours, etc.. The whole index is refreshed at the end of each month.

Re: Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

#7

Post by dfgonzalez »

So cool, a few questions:

1. The prices info, I assume is for US only, right? 2. Are you only analysing new products or also the used ones?

I created a similar (but very, very modest) proof of concept to track mercadolibre's prices (http://numok.com/products/view/samsung-t24a550/9), however it seems to be unusable without a human verifying each listing, as you state in your blog:

> This isn’t the highest price that we’ve recorded for a product though. Turns out this Samsung TV was priced at $1,000,000,000,000.00 ($1 trillion) in early November last year. A dozen sales of this would have gone a long way towards offsetting the American national debt!

3. Are you doing this validation in some way or unreal prices should be expected by using your API?

As stated before, great pricing! Although I'm not sure how does the limit of products work for the two initial account types (Up to 10,000).

Overall, I'm glad to have this API, thank you!

Re: Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

#8

Post by netvarun »

g_h wrote: post #2

Having historical pricing data seems particularly interesting. I've thought about building a fashion site that predicts pricing trends so you can predict when to buy items on sale, and it seems like this could serve as the pricing infrastructure. I wonder how I can tell what product sources are available, and whether new ones appear? I.e. is this only going to cover amazon.com, or does it know about nordstrom.com too…

That's a great idea. Pricing trends analysis could be done through the historical data we provide across the different merchants.

We do provide the affiliate purchase links to the products, available under the 'offers' field. Currently you can only figure out when new merchants appear by polling the product ('pull' mechanism). One idea which we have been toying around has been a 'push' mechanism where you can subscribe to a particular product through our API and we would notify if there has been any change (price change or new merchant selling it or product has been discontinued). Drop me a mail at varun semantics3.com if you want more details or wish to bounce off ideas.

Re: Show HN: Semantics3 – API for Products and Prices

#9

Post by govind201 »

dfgonzalez wrote: post #7

So cool, a few questions: 1. The prices info, I assume is for US only, right? 2. Are you only analysing new products or also the used ones? I created a similar (but very, very modest) proof of concept to track mercadolibre's prices ( http://numok.com/products/view/samsung-t24a550/9 ), however it seems to be unusable without a human verifying each listing, as you state in your blog: > This isn’t the highest price that…

1. Right now, we're focusing on the US. But we've made room for expanding internationally (the "currency" and "geo" fields are in place with this in mind).

2. We're analyzing used and refurbished products as well. Each offer is tagged with a "condition" field that conveys this.

3. The question of whether a price of a product is right or wrong is, we realized with time, subjective. Yes, $1,000,000,000,000.00 is very unlikely, but where does one drawn the line? Hence, we don't mark something as bad data and remove it from the database at the data layer. But we do handle this problem at the search layer - we internally rank products based on factors such as their (estimated) genuineness, popularity and so on. For the user, what this means is that when you query the API, only the most relevant products will be returned. The ranking system is constantly learning, so the vision is that it'll get better with time and data.

Thanks for your words about the pricing. Each API query returns upto 10 products; the free plan provides 1000 API queries a day. So you could retrieve upto 10000 products each day. Hope that clarifies. Glad you find the API useful - I'd love to know more about how you plan to use it!

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