Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
1–10 of 213 posts
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#2In the US, retail businesses are offering individualized and general coupons via the phone apps. I wonder if this pricing can be tracked, as it results in significant differences.
For example, I recently purchased fruit and dairy at Safeway in the western US, and after I had everything I wanted, I searched each item in the Safeway app, and it had coupons I could apply for $1.5 to $5 off per item. The other week, my wife ran into the store to buy cream cheese. While she did that, I searched the item in the app, and “clipped” a $2.30 discount, so what would have been $5.30 to someone that didn’t use the app was $3.
I am looking at the receipt now, and it is showing I would have spent $70 total if I did not apply the app discounts, but with the app discounts, I spent $53.
These price obfuscation tactics are seen in many businesses, making price tracking very difficult.
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#3Ah, I love this. Nice work!
I really wish supermarkets were mandated to post this information whenever the price of a particular SKU updated.
The tools that could be built with such information would do amazing things for consumers.
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#4In the US, retail businesses are offering individualized and general coupons via the phone apps. I wonder if this pricing can be tracked, as it results in significant differences. For example, I recently purchased fruit and dairy at Safeway in the western US, and after I had everything I wanted, I searched each item in the Safeway app, and it had coupons I could apply for $1.5 to $5 off per item. The other week, my w…
I wrote a chrome extension to help with this. Clips all the coupons so you don't have to do individual searches. Has resulted in some wild surprise savings when shopping. www.throwlasso.com
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#5In the US, retail businesses are offering individualized and general coupons via the phone apps. I wonder if this pricing can be tracked, as it results in significant differences. For example, I recently purchased fruit and dairy at Safeway in the western US, and after I had everything I wanted, I searched each item in the Safeway app, and it had coupons I could apply for $1.5 to $5 off per item. The other week, my w…
I wrote a chrome extension to help with this. Clips all the coupons so you don't have to do individual searches. Has resulted in some wild surprise savings when shopping. www.throwlasso.com
This looks amazing. Do you have plans to support Firefox and other browsers?
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#6Scraping tools have become more powerful than ever, but bot restrictions have become equally more strict. It's hard to scrape reliably under any circumstance, or even consistently without residential proxies.
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#7Very cool! I did something similar in Canada (https://grocerytracker.ca/)
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#8Scraping tools have become more powerful than ever, but bot restrictions have become equally more strict. It's hard to scrape reliably under any circumstance, or even consistently without residential proxies.
When I first started it there was a couple of instances that my IP was blocked - despite being a residential IP behind CGNAT.
I then started randomising every aspect of the scraping process that I could: The order that I visited the links, the sleep duration between almost every action, etc.
As long as they don't implement a strict fingerprinting technique, that seems to be enough for now
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#9In the US, retail businesses are offering individualized and general coupons via the phone apps. I wonder if this pricing can be tracked, as it results in significant differences. For example, I recently purchased fruit and dairy at Safeway in the western US, and after I had everything I wanted, I searched each item in the Safeway app, and it had coupons I could apply for $1.5 to $5 off per item. The other week, my w…
I wrote a chrome extension to help with this. Clips all the coupons so you don't have to do individual searches. Has resulted in some wild surprise savings when shopping. www.throwlasso.com
Ha! I have the same thing as a bookmarklet for specific sites. It’s fun to watch it render the clicks.
Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright
#10Ah, I love this. Nice work! I really wish supermarkets were mandated to post this information whenever the price of a particular SKU updated. The tools that could be built with such information would do amazing things for consumers.
Thanks!
If Greece's case is anything to go by, I doubt they'd ever accept that as it may bring to light some... questionable practices.
At some point I need to deduplicate the products and plot the prices across all 3 supermarkets on the same graph as I suspect it will show some interesting trends.