Getting started
Introduction
What the platform is, how its catalogue is organised and how scraping and comparison websites fit in.
The platform is a back office for product and price comparison. You keep a catalogue of products, record where each product is sold and at what price, and let your comparison websites show that data to visitors. Prices are kept up to date automatically by an external scraping service.
How the catalogue is organised
Everything you work with sits in a simple hierarchy.
| Level | What it is |
|---|---|
| Team | The shared space for the people you work with. Members have a role that decides what they may do. |
| Project | One comparison catalogue inside a team, for example "Home electronics". It has its own base currency and settings. |
| Brands, merchants, products | The things you compare: who makes the product, which shops sell it, and the product itself. |
| Offers | A product sold by a merchant at a web address, with its latest price. |
A team can hold several projects, and each project is completely separate from the others.
How the pieces work together
Three parts cooperate:
- The platform (this back office). You manage the catalogue here: brands, merchants, products and offers.
- Scrape Admin. An external service that visits each offer's page on a schedule, reads the price and availability using a scrape profile, and posts the result back to the platform by webhook. See Connect Scrape Admin and Scrape profiles.
- Comparison websites. Your public sites read the catalogue through the public API. Each website gets its own token, so you can see which site is reading and rotate its access without affecting others. See Websites and Public API.
In short: you describe what to track, Scrape Admin fetches the prices, and your websites display them.
What you can do
Where to start
New here? Read the concepts for the vocabulary, then follow the quick start to set up your first project.