ShopBoxUK
www.shopboxuk.com
Basic price search engine evolves into a multi-platform price comparison service and third party API provider.
Overview
MeltBrands(UK) approached Toobler to perfect its price search engine, ShopBoxUk. ShopBoxUk was conceived as a price comparison engine that collected latest data from over a thousand online sources regarding all kinds of. consumer products and compared prices for the end user. This is the equivalent of the user having to visit each of the over thousand websites and comparing prices individually.
The existing system had many flaws that affected both performance as well as data. By using the latest and best in available technology and industry accepted best practices, Toobler developed ShopBoxUk into a completely robust, scalable and flawless solution that now forms the core of a multi-platform, price comparison service and third party API provider.
Client Requirements
The client wanted solution to many problems that existed with the application. Important among them were:
- Removal and prevention of inaccurate and incomplete product & price information that crept into the system.
- Avoid data duplicity. Different naming conventions used by different vendors often led to same product being considered as a different one.
- Constantly update price and product information.
- Remove performance issues caused by huge data transactions.
The Toobler Touch
The developers at Toobler carefully studied the application and realized that a majority of the problems, including first three of the above listed, occurred due to the various differences in data provided by each vendor. From naming conventions to product categorizations, from file formats to encoding methods, the differences were many. All these were overcome with a single masterstroke, the datafeed module.
- The datafeed module – A custom module was developed to act as a window for all incoming the data feeds. This datafeed module sorts all incoming data into a common format used by ShopBoxUK for storage and operations. The whole module was developed solely using Cold Fusion and MSSQL which greatly enhanced performance.
- Automatic data updates – Using all available tools such as OpenXML and SQL Jobs, ShopBoxUK now has the ability to collect, process and update huge amounts of data without any human intervention.
- Once the requirements were met, it was realized that the solution was too powerful and robust to remain just a price comparison engine. This led to creation of an internet front end to the service, www.shopboxuk.com as well as desktop(AIR/Flex) and mobile(Android/IPhone) applications.
- An API for third parties to access all ShopBoxUK services is currently under development.
