If you liked my post quickly finding a deal on eBay, here are some ideas that I plan to use for Kimono Labs:
- Download my sales rates on Cardpool and Giftcard Zen – this will have to come in the future when Kimono “goes live”
- Download portal rates to specific vendors from Cashback Monitor – this will also come in the future when Kimono goes live
- Download gift cards at places like GiftCard Mall – this will start soon
- Download prices for specific products on retailers
Data Downloads
Industry jargon for downloading the data is called “scrapes.” Here’s why I plan to do the scrapes. For the rates, I can’t publicly publish all of the rates. I have been known to post a few in the past, but they were cherry picked because of the high visibility from other postings. In the current stage of Kimono Labs, all scrapes are public API’s. Once the subscription model goes live, the ability to make private the API’s will begin, and that is when I will begin the scrape. It is this reason why I will be waiting for the second bulletin.
Cashback Monitor allows you to create alerts and your own tracking to certain vendors, but you’re limited to a very low number. Using Kimono Labs, you have a variety of options to retrieve the data:
Email alerts or dumping into a Google Spreadsheet could be set up and it would be far more comprehensive than what Cashback Monitor could provide.
Why scrape gift cards from GiftCard Mall? Because if there’s 95 entries yesterday and there’s 96 now, that means they added a new one. I want to know as soon as possible when it happens. This will allow me to figure out if a gift card churn is profitable or not before every one else notices it.
Why would I scrape prices for specific products? Well, the tool that Big Habitat introduced us to: CamelCamelCamel only tracks Amazon. We want to track products not found on Amazon. For instance, Big Habitat knows all about the Netgear Nighthawk router so he doesn’t need to memorize the price. But there’s thousands of products and the power to recall is tough sometimes when you juggle a bunch of things.
What Will You Do?
I hope this has helped make some wheels turn for new ideas and now that you know what I plan to do, I’d love to hear what your thoughts on what you do.
If you want to share privately, I can understand because a few of mine will be private. Shoot me an email at chasingthepoints@gmail.com and we can talk further
In case any one asks, I am not scraping GiftCard Granny on the rates because there’s so much data in it that it becomes too complicated and slows down Kimono Labs to a slow crawl. In my opinion, using the ImportHTML command in Google Spreadsheets is the best play.
