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0 pointsjaza1y ago0 comments

Aussie here. I hadn't heard that price scraping is only quasi-legal here and that scrapers get shut down by the big supermarkets - but then again I'm not surprised.

I'm thinking of starting a little price comparison site, mainly to compare select products at Colesworths vs Aldi (I've just started doing more regular grocery shopping at Aldi myself). But as far as I know, Aldi don't have any prices / catalogues online, so my plan is to just manually enter the data myself in the short-term, and to appeal to crowdsourcing the data in the long-term. And plan is to just make it a simple SSG site (e.g. Hugo powered), data all in simple markdown / json files, data all sourced via github pull requests.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to help out, or if you know of anything similar that already exists: greenash dot net dot au slash contact

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4 comments · 3 top-level

sumedh1y ago· 1 in thread

> get shut down by the big supermarkets

How do they shut them down?

seoulmetro1y ago

Threaten legal action if scraping continues or something similar as the scraping ends abruptly for every site but the prices still sit online at the supermarkets site.

jasomill1y ago

But as far as I know, Aldi don't have any prices / catalogues online

There are a few here, but more along the lines of a flyer than a catalog:

https://www.aldi.com.au/groceries/

Aldi US has a more-or-less complete catalog online, so it might be worth crowdsourcing suggestions to the parent company to implement the same in Australia.

seoulmetro1y ago

Ironic that I get a few responses with "I am wanting to do the project".

I did it around 10 years ago and I think I've seen one a year since that. I didn't bother once I saw that people shipping were doing well and increasing their dataset only for it to be severely reduced later (I assume due to threats of legal action.)

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