I recently came across a live stockchecker script that is offered for sale and got a hold of a copy for review. Here is the authors blurb :
This PHP script with MYSQL contains all the functional bits (except for mailing list!) of the example site http://www.buywiifit.co.uk:
• An index table of the items, sortable by price, P&P and Merchant
• A stock history page for each merchant, showing when and how long the item has been in stock for
• An easy to use admin area: first, add your merchants and upload their logos. Then, just add the information for each item.The administrator sets a “stockword” for each merchant – a word that only appears on the product’s page when the item is in stock. For example, “In Stock”, “Available Now”, or even “Delivery In” are used on many merchants. If there’s any indication of stock on the product page, then the script will likely be compatible with that merchant (as the script examines the source, even images can be picked up).
When the PHP stockcheck script is run, it checks whether the items are in stock based on the concept above, and alters the database accordingly. This can either be run manually, or set as a cron job to run as often as you want. The site will then update as soon as it’s refreshed.
The BWF stock checker script requires PHP, MYSQL and, optionally, cron jobs for automatic stock checking. It includes full installation instructions, although the author will be happy to help out if there are any problems.
To purchase the script, send £15 via Paypal to harveycarpenter, at gmail dot com.
As you will see from the author’s own site, this is very much designed to operate as a standalone page leveraging searches for items that are in short supply.
The script essentially stores a product page URL and scrapes that page to look for the chosen stockword. As the author says, this can be accomplished by running a Cron script (supplied).
Initial installation was simple … ftp the script to your website and run a database table script to initialise the stockchecker database.
Thereafter it got a little ropey … with me finding a few issues that are actually very trivial to fix (even for me as someone who uses others scripts rather than being a php coder myself), but nonetheless just a little bit annoying.
My criticisms :
1. Would be much better if it included an installer to capture the DB details and set up the tables …. (maybe capture the install path .. see 3.)
2. Unnecessary dual db.php … use relative addressing to include (‘admin/db.php’); and drop the root one … could be a security issue (see 4)
3. The script is intolerant of being placed in other than root (change the includes to relatively address the header and db.php files)
4. Hide the editing files all in admin … it can become a password protected folder or renamed to avoid others accessing and deleting all the hard-entered URL data … (see point 9)
5. Maybe add a robots or .htaccess to stop admin directory browsing
6. Open all the vendor sessions in a new window (the In Stock Graphic and Visit Store link currently doesn’t)
7. Include a basic css file
8. Allow a non-numeric response in Delivery cost … it isn’t always black and white as it maybe free if order > £x or in Amazon’s case it depends upon whether it is on Amazon or Marketplace. I would like to be able to enter a ‘Check Vendor Delivery charge’
9. Fix admin menu!! (url.php and edit_url.php packaged in root rather than admin folder)
Sounds like a lot of errors doesn’t it? Well yes it does in numeric terms, but in practice most of these can be fixed in a few minutes …. and any basic coder (even I) can perform the necessary tweaks.
I put all the above to Harvey (the author) and he accepted it all as a very fair critique and will address once he has some time.
Do I think I would recommend it at the price?
Hell yes!! I believe that it is a bargain at £15 and arguably the price reflects that it isn’t quite a polished product. I told harvey already that if he were to distribute it with the points resolved I would market it at twice the price.
The fact is that the functional parts work perfectly in updating the stock status. It would be nice if the current price could be captured too rather than it being a manual task, but that is probably harder to scrape. Once again though, I think that even I could integrate this with any of the various datafeed download scripts to merge the current price into the stockchecker from the latest datafeed and avoid manual price updates.
Am I using it on any of my sites?
Yes. I am using it here.
