Crawler Application for Merchant Listing Verification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Comparison shopping sites may inadvertently exclude merchant offerings from their listings due to identifier mismatches or difficulties in recognizing search requests, leading to reduced visibility and referral fees for merchants.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a crawler application that verifies the presence of merchant offerings on comparison shopping sites by identifying unique item identifiers and ensuring their inclusion in network pages, using a feed system to maintain accurate and up-to-date listings.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If comparison shopping sites use automated listing systems to display merchant offerings, then the efficiency and coverage of product listings are improved, but identifier mismatches and recognition errors occur leading to excluded merchant offerings
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a feedback mechanism where the crawler application periodically verifies the presence of merchant offerings on comparison shopping sites. When an offering is found to be excluded or missing, the system generates a notification to the merchant, who can then resubmit the offering with corrected identifiers. This closed-loop feedback ensures continuous monitoring and correction of listing errors without manual intervention.
Solution Approach 2:
The merchant is empowered to self-correct identifier mismatches by receiving notifications about excluded offerings and resubmitting them through the system. The merchant's own data feeds and identifier mappings are used to resolve the mismatches, eliminating the need for external intervention and enabling automatic correction of listing errors.
2Productivity
If merchants pay referral fees for traffic from comparison shopping sites, then sales volume increases, but lost revenue occurs when offerings are excluded due to identifier issues
Solution Approach 1:
The system provides real-time feedback to merchants about which offerings are excluded from comparison shopping sites and why. This enables merchants to take corrective action before referral fee losses accumulate, ensuring continuous visibility and revenue generation from referral traffic.
Solution Approach 2:
The crawler application performs preliminary verification of merchant offerings before they are excluded from listings. By proactively identifying and notifying merchants of potential identifier mismatches or exclusion risks, the system prevents revenue loss before it occurs, rather than reacting after offerings are removed.
3Reliability
If manual verification of merchant offerings is performed on comparison shopping sites, then listing accuracy improves, but time consumption and operational cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system replaces manual verification with an automated crawler application that uses web browsing and data parsing to monitor comparison shopping sites. The crawler automatically retrieves and analyzes listing data, identifying excluded offerings and matcher errors without human intervention, thereby maintaining high accuracy while eliminating time consumption.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs self-verification by automatically monitoring its own listings on comparison shopping sites using the crawler application. The merchant does not need to manually check listings, as the system autonomously verifies presence and correctness of offerings, generating notifications only when issues are detected.
Data Source
AI summary
The present disclosure involves ensuring that items sold by a merchant appear in certain network pages. A network page is automatically accessed in a computing device. The network page is generated by a referral network site that displays at least one offering of an item by at least one competitor merchant. A unique identifier associated with the item is identified from the network page in the computing device. The unique identifier is stored in association with the item in a data store accessible to the computing device. The item and the unique identifier are included in a feed sent from the computing device of a merchant to the referral network site. The feed includes a listing of the item and a plurality of other items, wherein the item and the other items are offered for sale by the merchant.