Hacker News Reader

I worked on this, it was called Milo.com. we had crazy scraping and xml/csv feed ingestion. It was a terribly difficult business because most retailers hated us. ebay bought it and eventually killed it.

View on HN

Why did retailers hate you? Wouldn’t they want a solution that brings people to their store because you listed their product as being there and available?

That's what I'd hope as well. But maybe they didn't like it because it makes price competition too transparent?

That's a big part of it, yes. Retailers take advantage of information assymetry after all. While you're in Best buy, you may pay more than online to walk out with an item, but would you pay more if you could instantly confirm it's at Walmart next door for $20 less? Maybe not.

Funnily enough though Best Buy loved us and provided real time data via API and daily CSV data dumps just for us. They were like that, along with Toys R Us and AutoZone. Most others hated us, including Guitar Center after we accidentally DDOSed their web site with our scrapers.

Huh! Well thank you for your efforts! When was that? Do you think it would be possible to build it again?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com