[Gllug] Data Sources for Product Prices

[Richard Jones]

We were brainstorming something like this the other day.

Our basic premise was given what a shit job most websites do of
allowing you to buy stuff easily, what shops ought to do instead is
open up programming APIs ("web services") which would provide access
to prices and ordering.  Other companies would then come along and
provide user interfaces which talked to the APIs.  The company with
the easiest to use interface with the most useful features for
customers would then "win" by providing the most orders (thus taking a
larger amount of commission on the orders).  Meanwhile the shops save
money by not having to employ monkey web designers (or are the Real
Programmers required to implement the API more expensive ... hmmm)

In your case, an enterprising company could create barcode readers
which talked to your supermarket's ordering system (or perhaps
supermarkets' ordering systems - choosing the lowest price).  If the
system is good, it'll become popular and the company would make money.

Amazon do something like this with their API.  The trouble is that
Amazon's website is one of the very few websites out there which is
good, so people have a hard time making a better one!  The one site I
saw which used Amazon's API had a much worse interface than the real
thing ...

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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