What Ive long wanted was the the ability to map prices to SCUs by having folks simply take a pic of the UPC + price, just like gasbuddy or what not - in addition to scraping from grocery posting their coupon sheets online for scraping, in addition to people just scanning (non-PII) portions of receipts.
Can you share what you've made thus far?
* could it be used as an automated "price matching" finder? (for those companies that do a "we price match!" thing
My main drive was to document the crazy price hikes that's been going on in my home country, Greece, so I'm scraping its 3 biggest supermarkets and keep track of the prices of their products*
Had a lot of fun building and automating the scraping, especially in order to get around some bot catching rules that they have. For example one of them blocks all the requests originating from non-residential IPs, so I had to use tailscale to route the scraper's traffic through my home connection and take advantage of my ISP's CGNAT.
* I'm not doing any deduplication or price comparisons between the supermarkets, I only show historical prices of the same product, to showcase the changes.
Yeah in this case between these 3 supermarkets there are 2 options:
1. You choose your general location or
2. You don't choose
In the first option you get one less general category to choose from (for example they may not have fresh fish)
As far as I can tell, in both cases the supermarket closest to the delivery address is responsible for filling out your order and usually what happens is that they call you to let you know that they don't have something and suggest substitutions.
