Anyone here with API and or scraping expertise
Hi everyone,
Has anyone dealt with importing retail content such as store and products information into their apps now or in the past? How are Instacart , Doordash and Shipt doing it? I managed to secure some API keys to use an API connection for 6 different retailers but all of them do not work. It looks more like a maintenance issue. I am launching my app in alpha this weekend and this issue with content is holding me back. Some people are suggesting that I do scraping but I think it will be time consumng and also can raise some red flags with prospective partner retailers. Any help on this will be very much appreciated!
Doordash I'm guessing like the rest of that niche are asking the users to enter the data while might help them manually
Some bigger retail assistant companies might integrate/import from POS systems
Some sites used to have alternative content options, where you might have had easy export to a nice format it kinda depends what systems they are running on
Scraping is an option, it has many paid tools as well as manual, but you might be playing catch-up and might find edge cases and need to validate issues
For some niches you might find 3rd parties that would provide it for you as a service
There are services that can do scraping for you. Am sure some have free tiers to get you started. Fetching will be standard but each site will need dedicated parsers. What do you mean by red fags with partners?
Red flags like why did you use our content when you were not authorized to can arise when the time comes for the actual partneship deal to be signed.
Best go in the front door then. Maybe you could scrape some to showcase functionality then approach those you have not scraped without ruffling their feathers. But tbh if you show value then they should still be interested even though you didn't ask permission so long as you're not damaging their brand. It sounds like your app doesn't float without content so you're going to have to take a punt aren't you ?