I'm building a site where vendors will link their products to our product pages (for affiliate sales) and was wondering what algorithms people use to automate/facilitate this process? Right now they would have to manually enter the link for each product they own which is quite tedious. I noticed that Pricegrabber finds any product you look for and links directly to their pages. Example:
How do they do that so easily?
Pricegrabber has some api that a shop vendor can use to automatically update the products. This is a push service so basically the shop owner is doing what you describe: entering the product url and info. If the shop supports it this info is generated on a regular basis and uploaded.
They are not crawling or scraping data from the vendor, or updating their prices by hand.
The vendors have wired up their e-commerce store into PriceGrabber via the PriceGrabber merchant API, and when the merchants update their prices in their own system, PriceGrabber gets the updates from the merchant system when they push/publish updates.
No manual processes needed other than the the 1 change on the merchant's system, if done correctly.
A lot of systems in general work this way (I've worked on them myself, even).