Price Scanning App

[CyraxHB]

Hi everyone,

As with most people I've noticed our grocery bill increase a lot of the last few years. So this got me thinking if there are ways to track prices for individual food items. Turns out there aren't any local API's or decent data sources.

So I decided to build my own and this basically ended up being an android app that allows you to scan the barcode of an item from Woolworths, Checkers or Pick n Pay and the prices should display. I'm also building up price history but only have 3 weeks so far.

I've tested on food I've got at home, but if anyone is keen please download the app and let me know if it has decent coverage of the things you usually buy. No data gets stored or sent any where from the app.

Here's the play store link: Download from Play Store

I'm busy building functionality to create a grocery list that can be tracked as a whole with notifications on price changes etc.

 

[WAslayer]

Feature request:

Include functionality to create a shopping list.. i.e, you scan item when it's finished and you throw it away and will add it automatically to your shopping list and you can perhaps set a push notification schedule to remind you of the items or something..

 

[CyraxHB]

Feature request:

Include functionality to create a shopping list.. i.e, you scan item when it's finished and you throw it away and will add it automatically to your shopping list and you can perhaps set a push notification schedule to remind you of the items or something..

I'm hoping to add that in the couple of weeks.

 

[CyraxHB]

Thanks to those who have sent feedback on the app.

For any others that are keen to test the price scanning functionality below are some screenshots and details.

Once you scan an item it will give the price history available and you can then save it to a tracking list. So when the back end data updates it will automatically update your items so you don't need to scan them again.

There are around 25000 products across woolworths, picknpay and checkers in the database.

There are instances where the shops change the product name linked to a barcode so that can sometimes cause an issue.

The next big addition will be Takealot price info. I'm interested to see how they change prices before their so called specials.

 

[Dee96]

Hi

A useful feature would be being able to search for a product by text as opposed to baroda

Great app btw

 

[SaucePlz]

Nicely done.

Some feedback:
With the tracking of an item, it only tracks per store you select to track? In other words, if I want to keep track of a product that all 3 stores sell, I need to track it at WW, PnP & Checkers? Also meaning if new stores are added I would have to track the item there too? Is there some way to compare the pricing history between the stores?

When scanning a barcode and an item is found, display a small Toast notification saying 'item found' or some such and then load directly to the product page, displaying the price tracking for all stores on one graph. Decrease the datapoint entries from daily to weekly or even monthly, but including any price change that might happen during that interval, e.g. Saturday, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, Saturday etc. Prices rarely change on a daily basis, so it seems unnecessary to stuff so much data in there.

Same thing with the list of pricing info below the graph. Replace that with a filter, allowing the user to toggle which shops are displayed on the graph, perhaps the ability to enter a custom date range for the graph and below that, show the lowest current price, from which shop, when last that pricing was updated and if there has been movement in the price (even, up or down)



As mentioned above, the ability to create a shopping list would be useful.

Keep up the good work

EDIT: Added a mockup screenshot of what I described.

 

[GreGorGy]

Turns out there aren't any local API's or decent data sources.

So I decided to build my own and this basically ended up being an android app that allows you to scan the barcode of an item from Woolworths, Checkers or Pick n Pay and the prices should display. I'm also building up price history but only have 3 weeks so far.

This bit should be recommended reading for those people that come around from time to time with a great idea for an app.If you learn how to do it yourself, then do it yourself, yet get a useful app. Nice initiative and follow-up.

 

[CyraxHB]

Hi

A useful feature would be being able to search for a product by text as opposed to baroda

Great app btw

I'm planning to incorporate a search function at some point, especially if takealot is to be included. I'm still trying to figure out how to code that piece to work fast though, the dev version is still too slow.

 

[CyraxHB]

Nicely done.

Some feedback:
With the tracking of an item, it only tracks per store you select to track? In other words, if I want to keep track of a product that all 3 stores sell, I need to track it at WW, PnP & Checkers? Also meaning if new stores are added I would have to track the item there too? Is there some way to compare the pricing history between the stores?

When scanning a barcode and an item is found, display a small Toast notification saying 'item found' or some such and then load directly to the product page, displaying the price tracking for all stores on one graph. Decrease the datapoint entries from daily to weekly or even monthly, but including any price change that might happen during that interval, e.g. Saturday, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, Saturday etc. Prices rarely change on a daily basis, so it seems unnecessary to stuff so much data in there.

Same thing with the list of pricing info below the graph. Replace that with a filter, allowing the user to toggle which shops are displayed on the graph, perhaps the ability to enter a custom date range for the graph and below that, show the lowest current price, from which shop, when last that pricing was updated and if there has been movement in the price (even, up or down)

As mentioned above, the ability to create a shopping list would be useful.

Keep up the good work

Thanks, makes sense. There's definitely scope to adjust as I go along.

Now that the data collection and back end technical stuff is quite stable I'll focus a bit on making the views better. There are so many ways to interpret data, while at the same time its important to make it easy to understand and display properly on a phone screen.

Also, might be worth adding a website at some point.