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Newly loaded page showing no currently tracked products.
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In the middle of the process of adding a product.
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Loaded page with currently tracked products.
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Inspiration
Prices online are always changing which can leave you paying more than you need to or missing a good deal. However, current price tracking websites are only compatible with one website. By creating Price Tracker, we could have a one stop shop to find a target price for any item on any site.
What it does
Price Tracker web scrapes websites to find the current price and checks the price daily if it changes. Price changes are displayed in our website which compares the current price to your target price. When it's below the price the target price becomes green and you can just click the link to go buy the item.
How we built it
We built Price Tracker in two separate fronts that were merged together at the end. In the front end was the UI for the website and JavaScript to dynamically update the website. In the back end was the Python code that would scrape websites for the price. Together, these ends were merged to get the web scraped info to the user.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge is that every website is designed in a separate way that prevents the price from being universally located well. Furthermore, some websites have CAPTCHAs that prevent us from fully accessing prices with our web scraper.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to get the price out of most websites in a universal manner which is really good!
What we learned
Our team was made up of one general track member and one emerging track member, so our emerging member had a lot to learn. He was put in charge of designing the UI despite not really knowing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and how to combine them together but was able to understand and design the website in the end.
Future Changes
We hope to be able to create push notifications that would alert users when prices fall below their target prices and create an auto refresh feature that would get new prices automatically every day.
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