New Inventory Checker Tool (supports Home Depot, Staples, Target, & Walmart so far)

anthonyparcad said:   Target isn't working anymore. Can it be fixed? I would really appreciate it. I've been using the Target one a lot lately and now it doesn't work.

You'll have to use Target link for an arbitrary item and change the dcpi(last 9 number of the link) to the one you're looking for. Its not that bad.

When I used this with the appropriate DPCI and zip code, it just pulls up a more or less blank generic target webpage, nothing mentioning stock or locations.

I would like to know more. I like to track toys on zoolert but would rather have my own personal tracker for items where I could be notifie when something is in stock at the stores I choose it to search whether it is toys, electronics or shoes, etc.

Interesting if it works. Would like to get more details. Other than Target, do you enter the UPC number to search for an item say for WalMart and the others? Doesn't pull up anything but an error when I put in a known UPC number for a toy.

rachemnah said:   Is there a way to get a full list of Staples inventory using this tool - an excel file ?

Maybe, but do you have 40 500 sheet reams of paper?

is it possible to fix Home Depot stores link or look for stores by zip code? thanks

Site moved: http://checkinventory.site44.com

ecoamandara said:   Hi,

We have a need for an inventory checker that crawls clothing suppliers inventories to see if the products we have in our online store are still available. Do you think your solution could be modified to provide this information? Are you aware of a system that would provide this service?

Thanks,
AmandaWell, it depends on a lot of factors actually. First off, you can only check a company's inventory if the company has a publicly accessible inventory interface. Every company's website is different... like snowflakes! Therefore, a custom solution is required for every single website. I wanted to include more websites, but sometimes the interface is just too complicated to reverse engineer.

Regarding your personal situation: you haven't given me much to go off of. From what it sounds like, you rely on other companies' inventories to reflect the inventory of your own online store. That's nowhere near the intention of the tool I wrote. The tool I wrote is a 100% client-side implementation. For your purposes, you will need something much more involved, and it sounds like a custom job. Hopefully your supply sites have service-based APIs, so at least you can get the job done IF you were willing to go through with it.

Just a side note: Even if you were to have this solution implemented for your website, there's no guarantee that the supply sites won't change their method of data interchange. As you can see in this thread's history, even the smallest changes in these websites can break the functionality.

Duaber said:   Is there a way to lookup an item at WalMart by UPC, WalMart no., or sku. Not all of walmarts stuff is on the website i'm able to track things with the WalMart app scanning with printed barcodes but looking for faster searching.
Every WalMart I've ever been to has UPC scanning stations in several places throughout the store, where you can hold the UPC under the scanner and it will tell you the item and price. Hope that helps.

jim045 said:   Looks like FW effect has taken its toll
Sweet... you guys are awesome
Funny thing is, the amount of bandwidth used by the site is minimal. All of the "fetching" is done by the user's browser. Site44's monthly bandwidth cap for a free account is 100MB. There is 50KB MAX of files that need to be fetched for the page to load completely. So I guess that's about 2,000 page uses in the last month. Anyway, I'll see what I can do about hosting this elsewhere. Bear with me.

FeloniusMonkey shoot me an email I might have a job for you...

zubba said:   How accurate is the inventory for Staples? Anyone have an idea? Results say low inventory, but then when going to the store, they don't have any of the item that said "low inventory." Low inventory is "some" inventory, not 0 inventory. I already realize this is the fault of Staples inventory being inaccurate, not your tool.Low inventory is low. Could be in the hands of a customer prior to check out. Could be a damaged one take to the back, Could be someone picked it up and put it down elsewhere in the store

They could report zero inventory instead of low, but then, people would get upset that they had some and said they were out

Low vs zero is a tough inventory problem to solve =

Any idea why if I go to the page from my history in IE that I see inventory for a split second and then it goes straight to Target or Staples website saying not found?

Great work, I can see these sort of inventory-checking programs becoming ubiquitous in the near future... Gone will be the days where you spend 20 minutes driving to a store only to find out the products you want are out of stock.