Price Check

Access the website via iPhone
Access the website via computer

Inspiration

Utilizing price comparison tools can save people lots of money. Unfortunately, not many use it when they buy their expensive laptops and smartphones. Either it becomes too tedious to use or they just simply forgot to use one. To make matters worse, not many price checker/ comparison tools exist, and so we’re here to solve this issue.

What it does

Price Check features a search bar where users can type in what product(s) they want to search, and using their input, Price Check will forward this input into the search bars of large retailer websites and generate a list of products (with pictures and price) matching as closely to the keywords the user has typed. Price Check will make sure that users are able to find the most affordable products at the start of their search. If users find a product in the list they are interested in, they can click on it, which redirects them to the page of the product on the retailer website.

How we built it

This project was mainly built using HTML, Bootstrap, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP

Challenges we ran into

Parsing complex HTML structures from retailer websites Learning from scratch the process of web scraping Did not know much about how to connect our PHP front-end code to the back-end implementation done in JavaScript

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully search the pricing of different items on different websites.

What we learned

In the creation of the front-end, we learned how to use bootstrap with the knowledge of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Moreover, we learned how to use Node.js, PHP, Rest API, and the skill of HTML parsing to build the robust back-end for price scraper.

What's next for Untitled

Add more retailers' websites into our price scraper for searching. Improve the sorting algorithm of the price checker because there's a bug. Remove useless pricing information using AI or machine learning techniques.