Comments on: Mpire graphs price trends for shoppers

By: Mpire to Unveil Power-Shopping Plug-In

Mpire to Unveil Power-Shopping Plug-In — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:20:23 +0000

[...] We’ve been getting “just in time for the holidays” pitches for coverage from quite a few shopping sites lately but Seattle based number crunchers Mpire have come out with one of the best new shopping products I’ve seen yet. The company’s site launched in June of this year. It compares prices on items for sale at a list of online retailers and tracks eBay auction prices for items over time. The graph acts (and looks) like Farecast airfare predictions, but for past auction price trends. [...]

By: TechCrunch en français » Mpire dévoile un plugin très utile pour vos achats

TechCrunch en français » Mpire dévoile un plugin très utile pour vos achats — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 06:50:08 +0000

[...] Alors que Noël approche nous avons suivi pas mal de sites de shopping et le meilleur nouveau produit, jusqu’à présent, est selon moi celui présenté par la compagnie basée à Seattle Mpire . Le site de la compagnie a été lancé cet été en Juin . Il compare les prix d’objets d’après une liste de commerçants et suis les enchères d’eBay tout au long de leur durée. [...]

By: Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Mpire Offers Power-Shopping Plug-In

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Mpire Offers Power-Shopping Plug-In — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:07:02 +0000

By: jdauvxfn

jdauvxfn — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 06:37:03 +0000

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By: Ridhima Suri

Ridhima Suri — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 21:43:31 +0000

Hi,
I was just using another site that does similar things. http://corp.and...le.com/research for ebay data. They claim, and it seems to be correct that they can auto filter everything out. So the concern you had is auto taken care of. If you search for a camera… they remove all bags and it gives awesome prices.

Ridhima

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 05:23:57 +0000

Dave here, one of the co-founders at Mpire. There are two parts to answering your question:

1. Initially, the core ingredient in our historical pricing engine is eBay Marketplace Data. We literally parse through millions of rows of historical data about what has bought and sold on eBay, and who is purchasing it to help you understand how much to pay. We get the raw data directly from eBay. We have some pretty smart folks who work with the data to make it digestible.

2. The marketplaces like what we’re doing. We’re doing a combination of API level access for some marketplaces and what we call “Flash Crawling” for the others. Flash crawling is a little different that your traditional crawling, but necessary for providing real-time display of items that have an end time. When a user initiates a search through Mpire, we pass the request through to the appropriate site and crawl the return results in real-time.

This has a few big benefits: 1) we get real-time feedback which is critical for products that are time sensitive 2) we don’t have to write crawlers that pound our partner sites walking through their data and utilizing resources; they’re serving us results just as they would a user. It’s consistent with their terms of service and they’re supportive of our approach.

Dave

By: anthropocentric

anthropocentric — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 04:44:47 +0000

How is mpire getting the data? Do they have the rights to use the data from the above names web sites? Are they “screen scraping,” which is usually against the TOS of major web sites?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:39:32 +0000

But what about Qunu?

By: TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Mpire 買い物客に価格変動グラフを提供

TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Mpire 買い物客に価格変動グラフを提供 — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 22:22:28 +0000

[...] [原文へ] [...]

By: Nick Pang | Wii Preorder

Nick Pang | Wii Preorder — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:09:21 +0000

i’m getting a ‘503 service unavailable’ error…

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:07:00 +0000

My name is Dave and I’m one of the co-founders at Mpire. Marshall thanks for the write up and everyone else for their comments. Couple of things:

1. khang.toh/Jimmy, We updated one of the servers this morning and it caused a hiccup. We knocked out the problem. Should be working as advertised now. Sorry about that.

2. Marshall, agreed that trying to fashion a catalogue out of search results is a challenge. You have to admit though, our graphics guy rocks! Anyway, one of things we’ll be doing immediately is putting exclude words and other settings on the search strings within the pricing guides. That simple act goes a long way towards getting the results you want; keeping things apples vs. apples. As we talked about, we’re also spending a lot of time working on ways to help the user refine their search, so that they get exactly what they’re looking for, as quickly as they can. And once that search is nailed, the historical data we provide can be very powerful in helping figure how much you should pay. Its early days in our efforts and stay tuned for improvements in this area.

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 19:55:06 +0000

khang toh: Same here… I even used one of their suggested items and just got the main page over and over again…

By: Ken Stone

Ken Stone — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:39:49 +0000

I’ve been using mpire for over a year as their core business was/is an eBay seller tool.

By: khang.toh

khang.toh — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:36:43 +0000

Site is not very usable, tried to search electronics and it keeps bringing me back to the main page.

By: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:01:57 +0000

Thanks Dave. You win the prize.

By: Dave Naffziger

Dave Naffziger — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 17:58:47 +0000

I believe you meant zillow.com.