Alihistori - smart shopping tools

Why we have made the service alihistory.com

In September of this (2016) year, we launched a project to collect analytical data on the work of one of the leaders of the e-commerce segment - aliexpress.com.

The purpose of the project alihistory.com is to identify trends and mechanisms for doing business in the field of Internet sales with the further development of a business model and its publication in the public domain.

Why choose Aliexpress? On the pages of this site sold tens of millions of products, deployed thousands of stores from China and other countries. Aliexpress is a leader in the number of sales both in China and in Russia. In the open access there is statistical information about the goods, such as the number of orders, product reviews, evaluation of quality, compliance and delivery, and so on. Also worth noting is the huge audience of Aliexpress. Learn so leaders.
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A number of tools were created for the study, which, in our opinion, will be useful for ordinary users. About the work and the possibilities of the add will stop in more detail.

Some technical information

A self-written crawler script was created that daily bypasses all products from the database and removes necessary characteristics and saves all changes to the database so that temporary changes can be tracked. There is also a script that matches similar photos on the hashes. All scripts are written in php, data is stored in mysql. For the operation of the service, two VPS servers are used to distribute the load. More than 540 thousand products are examined daily. For all the time (from September 2016) research recorded 5 million changes in the price of goods, and 4.7 million changes in the size of discounts.

Price monitoring: why and how

On Aliexpress, prices for tens of thousands of products change daily. Our crawler once a day bypasses all products from the database and updates the indicators. We collect prices (with or without a discount) in dollars, and then convert at the rate of aliexpress to other currencies.

Monitoring allows you to visually see all price fluctuations over time. It also allows you to identify situational surges in cost and signal buyers that you should not order goods at a given time.

Each item in the card displays a convenient for quick analysis chart of price changes over a certain period of time.

Change in the number of orders

Tens of thousands of products are bought on the site every day. And the number of orders of one or another commodity item is one of the factors of the quality of this product (we are now talking about aliexpress, for other sites there may be other patterns).

By monitoring the change in the number of orders, you can track the effect of marketing tools for both sellers and the site as a whole.

Change the number of reviews

When shopping online, unfortunately, there is no way to "touch" the purchased item. Buyers have to rely when choosing a product for secondary indicators and signs, one of which is the number of product reviews. True, on aliexpress, a special approach to reviews. Some sellers offer bonuses or even extort good reviews from buyers. Therefore, it is worth looking at not only the quantity, but also the quality and content of reviews. At this stage of development, our system only tracks changes in the number of reviews and ratings calculated on the basis of customer ratings.

Search for the same product

This functionality of our service is in beta test. At the moment, the search function for similar products finds positions with the same images.

The search works as follows: a separate script counts the hash function for product images, then the hashes for the given product (image) are searched for in the base of hashes. This approach works very mediocre - there are both false-positive responses (unlike products are marked as similar), and false-negative responses (obviously similar products are not found). We are looking for a solution on how to make the system function properly.

By the way, at the aliexpress itself, this function does not work at all, although it is claimed.

Nevertheless, the problem of finding the same goods in Ali is very relevant, since many products are sold in several stores and differ not only in price, but also in the quality of implementation, the quality of the work of sellers and other characteristics. Having before your eyes a list of identical products with some metrics, the buyer can choose the most advantageous offer for themselves. For example, save and buy cheaper - we want to give him a tool to be able to choose between the same goods from different vendors on the site.

Having a choice is always better than no one.

The correct operation of the search function of the same goods



False triggered search function of the same goods

Monitoring of discounts on goods

We all love discounts, and love freebies even more. On aliexpress, just a sea of ​​goods with discounts, and yet there are coupons and sales - just a paradise for both buyers and marketers.

With discounts always and everywhere (not only on Ali), not everything is clean. We want to help users find real discounts, not the mythical 90%. All values ​​of discounts are entered daily in our database and recorded on the chart for easy perception of information.

Announcement and analysis of sales

We analyze all products that are involved and will participate in sales from the "brand-focus" section on Aliexpress.

Notification and Subscription System

Our service offers a system of alerts about changes in prices for monitored products. Users do not even need to register, just need to agree to receive browser push-notifications that work in Chrome, Firefox desktop and mobile versions. Twice a day, we send a notification if there is a change in prices in the list of monitored products.

Product filters

Shopping should be comfortable, not like a quest. We thought and decided that these filters and samples would make life easier for Ali customers.

Structuring products by discount and category

A handy tool for sorting goods with aliexpress. It is possible to choose products from a specific category and a certain discount value, for example, men's shirts with a discount of 50%.

Structuring goods by price and category

Users can find products of a certain value. There is also a set of ready-made filters - goods up to $ 1, up to 3 dollars, and so on.

More information about the filters can be found in the manual .

Identification of fake discounts

On aliexpress there are so-called “fake discounts” (our more detailed analysis of sales 11.11 here ).

“Lime” discount in our understanding - this is when the product fell, but did not become cheaper than the minimum price * for the last month.

* Minimum price with current discounts (if any). For example, the price of a product is 1200 rubles without a discount, and with a discount of 896 rubles, this means that the minimum price is 896 rubles.

We signal to our users that the discount may not be real - every “delinquent” product has an exclamation mark in its name.

The definition of exchange rates on Aliexpress

The dollar exchange rate is not displayed explicitly on the aliexpress pages and is calculated at the prices of the same product in different currencies.

This is the main functionality of our service at the moment. Instructions for working with the service can be found on this page .

There are a lot of plans for the development of the system and additional functionality, a pity a day is not 40 hours :)

We oppose spontaneous purchases and spending, against “fake” discounts and other marketing gimmicks of sellers. We encourage everyone to make purchases deliberately.

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