The Best Deal Telegram bot tracks discounts in supermarkets in different cities of Ukraine in real time, automatically compares prices for specifically selected products, and sends daily reports with the most advantageous offers on the market.
The Best Deal Telegram bot tracks discounts in supermarkets in different cities of Ukraine in real time, automatically compares prices for specifically selected products, and sends daily reports with the most advantageous offers on the market.
The bot was created by a Reddit user under the nickname ihor_m14 . According to the author, this is his thesis.
Instead of reading a bunch of channels with chaotic discounts on everything in a row, you can subscribe only to specific products that you regularly buy (for example, your favorite butter, coffee, or milk).
Best Deal sends you a notification every day at the time you set. The notification will indicate the best price for the product, where it is most profitable to buy it, as well as the difference in price compared to the previous day, so you can see the real dynamics.
The bot compares prices in all supermarkets at the same time and looks for the cheapest offer on the market. For example, if Silpo offers a product "at a discount" for 55 hryvnias, and in Metro it costs 54 hryvnias without any promotions, the bot will show you the option in Metro, because it is objectively cheaper there.
The bot is written in Python. It takes information about products and prices directly from the Zakaz.ua service — from there it parses catalogs of large chains such as Metro, Novus, etc. The developer chose this particular source because the prices on Zakaz.ua correspond as closely as possible to the real price tags in physical stores, unlike regular supermarket websites, where the data often does not match reality.
How does the bot understand that it is the same product in different stores? The biggest challenge for such services is to combine products that are labeled differently in different supermarkets, for example, "Milk 2.5%" and "Milk paste. 2.5 percent."
For this purpose, the developer created a special grouping algorithm. The bot independently analyzes the names of products and combines them into one card. Currently, this algorithm works automatically and already combines identical products with 95% accuracy. Work on improving the system is ongoing to reduce the minimum errors (when one product is sometimes divided into two different groups) to zero.
