As a member, I think its a great idea - except that pricing changes dynamically from stores (eg look at the front page here - many 1 or 2 day specials) - and Gamecafe updates by using trawl bots which are sometimes weeks out of date for many sites (or havent trawled for that item at all)
Would be better if stores provided feeds to Ecogamer direct, and bots validated current pricing - if there is too many mismatches (ie possible baiting) then investigate. I cant see this working with Gamecafe, as they dont accept live feeds from what I understand and rely on the trawl bots
Perhaps feeds can be sent straight to ecogamer? I know many stores already have live feeds as they do this to appear of Getprice etc - so perhaps using a feed that already exists and sample it for items of interest?
As the GameCafe site administrator, the trawl bots we use discard data after 3 days, so no price on the website is more than 3 days old by definition, but it does rely on trawling. In some instances we are processing data feeds when webmasters have provided them to us.
I could provide all the data in a standard format (xml, JSOM, ATOM or whatever) - so the EG guys wouldn't need to waste time worrying about each and every store. The algorithm has been updated recently, and it actually crawls all websites in our database fairly (breadth first, so to speak), so each and every store gets the same coverage over a given time period - so if the game isn't listed, it probably means it is out of stock, or that store doesn't have the game at all.
For less popular games, we don't try to keep them updated in the database, as it wastes valuable time and resources, when people are just interested in getting prices for the latest (popular) games.
I have to say, maybe just a link (as Aquil0 suggests) against each product would be easier!
Wingman
