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Ecommerce: getting the prices right
# 🤝help
r
Hey folks. If our customers are ecommerce store owners, it's a tough sell if the Bot gets the prices wrong. Actually, I wouldn't even try and sell them that Bot: as an ecommerce store owner myself, I wouldn't buy it. So Sylvain seems to suggest here

https://youtu.be/S5t-e81UF-g?t=3257▾

That we can manually execute a direct scape of the website, rather than an indirect scape of a search engine index (which, let's face it, is going to be an indeterminate amount of time out of date) Have I misinterpreted?
f
Hey @ripe-cat-27461 , have you tried out the new tables feature? I think it would get you the reliability you need.
r
No. Can you sketch out how it would solve the "scrape the live site" or "scrape the out-date-index" issue?
f
is this a shopify ecommerce website?
r
My own store is written in raw C# over SQL Server DB. But in the future, my clients could have any type of store
f
I know a shopify integration is in the works. These are all made public once live https://github.com/botpress/botpress/tree/master/integrations
once it's live it would pretty straightforward to extrapolate from there.
for the tables, let me check internally i heard something about dynamic third party support
r
Great. I'll look forward to being able to integrate with shopify. In the meantime, I could do with a definite answer to this question: as it stands today, "website knowledge bases" will essentially "scrape" Bing's cached version of that domain, rather than the actual html content on the domain? I desperately need to know. Because if true, I can essentially abandon the website KB as a reliable source of price info for ecommerce and start working on workarounds such as .... tables .... or whatever. But really need to know because programming effort is less if "price scrape" from website can be made to work in (more or less) real time
f
Yes right now it's working with a the bing index, that is accurate.
however a static scrape function is coming very soon, for 1. more reliability, 2. more control
oh so is your issue coming from your index being out of date with bing? we are able to get changes to the botpress reflected rapidly by asking for a crawl on the webmaster tool. For smaller volume websites, i can see the crawls happening not so frequently and being a big pain.
I think from a solutions perspective with something that can go on sale intra-day or prices can change on a daily basis, relying on a bing web crawl, would definitely not be recommendable. I think the long term solution if to be completely synced in with the backend to have up to date prices and inventory. For descriptions and what not i imagine it works great.
r
>> prices can change on a daily basis, relying on a bing web crawl, would definitely not be recommendable
Good to hear. I was beginning to think I was being unreasonable!
In the meantime, I was thinking of experimenting with trying to intercept a user question that has "price enquiry intent" and send it to a new workflow that works off a PDF or something of exact current prices. I think the "extent of knowledge" in that workflow can be constrained to the PDF by putting it in the same folder as the workflow. Let me know if I'm barking up a reasonable tree !
r
That is a good approach, yes! Keeps it rather more simple than integrating with a backend system too! You'll just have to ensure the pdf or plain text in that folder is up to date and published when there is a price change.
r
Thanks, Jesse. Good to know. Enjoying - and learning at lot - from your live tutorials, by the way. Keep it coming, Bud !
@freezing-printer-49373 Yes, it's out-of-date prices coming from the Bing index that's the issue here. I'm running a few experiments with my own store to see how quickly Bing offers the updated knowledge. But however quickly it were to be, it's not a robust solution for ecommerce. Prices can change fast. A bot calming asserting the wrong prices is going to be tough to sell! Looks like we've got some stuff in the pipeline, though. So great!
f
Yeah, stay posted. Alot of stuff if coming to address reliability, currentness and many other issues relating to all types of KBs.
They are getting a massive overhaul that are a big must, especially in a business context.
r
Maybe not a good solution in your (@User) custom ecommerce implementation but with WordPress and Shopify there is a REST API you can call to get all the product details. I'm guessing you already know this but mentioning for any lurkers.
r
@rich-oxygen-43707 Thanks for that. No I did not know per se, but would have started looking: so you saved me some hours there. Sounds as if you've got some experience with ecommerce bots?
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