HI Folks,
I hope someone here can help me. I am looking at a computer hardware ecommerce site.
I have some questions about the practicalities of maintaining such a site.
1. Some of my competitors have sites that have tabluated details for each item on the site, and there would be at least 10,000 items on the site.
How do they get and format such detailed information about all these items?
The csv files that are supplied nightly from the suppliers to contain a description, but it is nowhere near as detailed as what some of the competitors are listing.
2. All the competitors photos are with the same background and nicely formatted.
I get the impression that they are ripping it from somewhere, but where?
The site I am refering to is www.c1com.co.nz
If someone could enlighten me I would be very grateful.
Thanks,
-Al

If it's a really big site, with lots of people behind it, they're probably doing it all by hand. Loading long descriptions from the product's site and copying it to their own.

If you refer to the ratings or price trend, that's just a PHP script that records all price changes they make and a seperate PHP script for processing user reviews.

Looks like they have about 3,000 products.

That must be a huge job by hand.

What about a spider?

And where are they getting all those photos?

It is pretty normal that the company's site also contains photographs of the items they are providing.
And I'm pretty sure it's done by hand because a spider just won't do.
They would have to search the company's site over and over again for each new product they add.