Tool to integrate with any ecommerce website to extract catalogue/product details

Question

Hi all,

Q) Is there any tool to integrate with any e-commerce websites to extract catalog/product details for its mobile website.

I reviewed JDOM and screen-scraper solutions. They are not fulfill my requirements properly and I need to rework for certain scenarios like (desktop website layout has been changed, I need to change setting for these). Moreover, I want to maintain mobile websites with ease of maintenance. Because I want to provide mobile website services to different ecommerce clients.

Any reply will be appreciated

Answer 1

Unless all those e-commerce websites agree on one standard API to provide you access to their catalog data, you will have to process each site on an individual basis, either manually or with some custom logic that will only work for this particular site.

This won't work reliably however since as soon as one of the webmasters changes some little thing in their markup, your custom code will stop working.

There is an API that many providers use to provide access to their catalog data to an affliliated third party.

Open Catalog Interface (OCI)

Answer 2

Automation Anywhere can do it pretty nicely. It can extract data from the e-commerce site and also get it stored in your database. And it has some specialty because of which even if the website is changed it still captures the data properly. I have been using it since an year now and it helped a lot in reducing my cost and effort to a great extent. A page on its web data extraction capacity will explain you more & you can even find the free download link inside.

Answer 3

I worked on a product that does exactly what you're asking many years ago, with precisely the same goal: extract parts of websites for mobile display, and be resilient to changes in the website (essentially, identify and follow individual pieces of content even if they move around the screen).

Being resilient to changes turns out to be a very difficult problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if there still isn't a free (beer OR speech) product that tackles this. (And I would be very interested in learning about it if anyone does know one).

The company I worked for (Clickmarks) has been bought & sold a couple of times since I was there, and at this point I don't know if it's still in business or who owns it, but the website is still operational, so you might be able to contact them and see if they've continued to develop the platform and are willing to license it.