Overview

This module adds a new tab on Product Template where you can register competitor product URLs and retrieve their latest public price. It is designed to help sales and purchasing teams quickly compare your product pricing against selected competitors.

Key Features

• Competitor lines on product template with:
  • Competitor name
  • Product URL on competitor website
  • Last fetched price and currency
  • Last fetch timestamp and status message
  • Auto Fetch flag (for potential scheduled jobs)
• On‑demand fetching:
  • A per‑line “Fetch” button
  • A product‑level button “Aducere pret concurenta” to fetch all lines at once
• Robust price extraction:
  • First tries structured data (JSON‑LD / Microdata) via extruct when available
  • Falls back to HTML heuristics using lxml selectors
• Graceful error handling with clear status stored per line

How It Works

1. When you press “Fetch” (on a line) or the product button, the module performs an HTTP GET to the competitor URL using a browser‑like User‑Agent.
2. If extruct is installed, the module attempts to parse JSON‑LD/Microdata and extract price and currency (Offer/AggregateOffer patterns).
3. If no structured data price is found, it tries common HTML selectors (meta tags and elements whose class/name suggests price) using lxml.
4. The found price is written on the line, together with the fetch timestamp and an “OK” status. If a currency code is detected and exists in your DB (e.g., EUR, USD), the line’s currency is updated accordingly.
5. If nothing can be extracted, the line gets a clear status (e.g., “Price not found on page”).

Usage

• Open any Product (Product Template) and go to the “Competitor Prices” tab.
• Add one or more competitor lines:
  • Competitor: e.g., “Altex”
  • Product URL: the full URL of the competitor’s product page
• Click “Fetch” on a line to update just that entry, or use the product‑level button to fetch all lines.

Dependencies

Python libraries used at runtime:

• requests
• lxml
• Optional: extruct and w3lib for structured data (JSON‑LD/Microdata) parsing

If extruct is not installed, the module still works via HTML fallback.

Security & Access

• Internal users (base.group_user) can read/create/write/delete competitor lines by default. Adapt access rules to your needs.

Notes & Limitations

• Competitor websites vary widely. While structured data improves accuracy, some pages may hide or obfuscate prices; heuristic extraction may fail. Site‑specific selectors can be added if needed.
• Automatic/scheduled fetching (cron) is not enabled by default but can be added easily later, using the provided auto_fetch flag to mark lines eligible for periodic updates.

Testing

The module ships with an Odoo test suite which mocks HTTP requests to ensure deterministic results:

• Validates JSON‑LD/Microdata extraction path
• Validates HTML fallback via meta tags
• Validates proper error handling and product‑level action

Run with a disposable DB, for example:

./odoo/odoo-bin -c odoo18.conf -d o18_test -i deltatech_competitors_price --test-tags=deltatech_competitors_price --stop-after-init

License

OPL-1

Table of contents

Authors

• Terrabit
• Dorin Hongu

Maintainers

This module is part of the dhongu/deltatech project on GitHub.

You are welcome to contribute.