gtin-cloud

GTIN Cloud

Without using a database, how would one store and access Item informations by its GTIN?

We need a folder storage convention that is easy to access without sacrificing performance.

Storage Stragegy

Let say you have a ficticious GTIN number 00123456789012. Then the folder path for this would be: 123/456/789/00123456789012/

1. Drop the first to 2 digits (00) - these are usually package and country identifier
2. Split the next 9 numbers into 3 digits folder structure - these are usually the Company Prefix (CP)
3. And store image and data with the full GTIN folder path, example: 123/456/789/00123456789012/(index.jpg/index.json)

The Power of 3s

• We know that, when storing in the cloud like AWS S3, the first 3 characters identify the partition it use to store the data. This improve the speed of access.
• Storing in 3 characters also prevent a folder from having too many file and folders; assuming that it will all be numeric, will result in less than 1000 objects per folder. Most cloud storage services, including AWS S3, also limit response/listing to 1000 objects. Also, if we were to download/sync these files to a local storage, it will help with folder listing speed.

Security

Does this kind of convention create a security issue? What if I want my data to be private?

Security can be achieved by adding an API Key to the service, and disabling public access to the cloud bucket. Obscurity is not Security!

TIP

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) would go a long way to help increase the performance of Cloud Storage access. AWS also provide CDN through their Cloudfront service.

Research API Integrations

This section introduce pulling data from various vendors. We segment the Vendor’s storage path to help with data retrieval and/or purge if requested by the Vendor.

Primary

APIs with basically limitless calls and return an image. You can setup job to pre-cache your data based on some GTIN database.

• Syndigo - https://api.syndigo.com/ui/product/?skip=0&take=1
• Kwikee - https://api.kwikee.com/public/v3/data/gtin/%s
• Tesco - https://dev.tescolabs.com/product/?gtin=%s
• EAN Data - https://eandata.com/feed/?v=3&find=ean13&keycode=apikey&mode=json

• [x] Open Food Facts - https://(world

  us).openfoodfacts.org/api/v0/product/%s.json

Secondary

APIs with low daily/monthly limit. These vendors can be use on-demand since it would be costly to use them for pre-cache. Also, some of these do not include image such as USDA and Nutrition APIs.

• DigitEyes - https://www.digit-eyes.com/gtin/v2_0/?upcCode=%s&field_names=all&language=en&app_key=%s&signature=%s
• Google Shopping - https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&tbs=vw:l,new:1&q=%s (scrape Google Shopping Web result) Note: seem to be constantly changing and unreliable. May also have algorithm to defeat scraping.
• Search UPC - http://www.searchupc.com/handlers/upcsearch.ashx?request_type=3&upc=%s&access_token=%s
• UPC ItemDB - https://api.upcitemdb.com/prod/trial/lookup?upc=%s
• Barcodeable - https://www.barcodable.com/api/v1/%s/%s
• Walmart - https://api.walmartlabs.com/v1/items?apiKey=%s&upc=%s
• USDA - https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list?qlookup=%s
• Boycott - https://www.buycott.com/upc/%s, example: https://www.buycott.com/upc/078732004245
• EBAY
• BestBuy
• Amazon
• Target

Please feel free to submit any API or Web scraping integration request. We can discuss in the issue how to integrate them: Primary/Secondary/WebScraping etc…

Roadmap

Possibly integrate proxycrawl or similar service?

API

POST|GET /store/{gtin}?type=image&vendor=vendor&url=https://the.urlencoded.com/image.jpg

POST or GET to store the GTIN data on AWS S3. POST body will become index.json and url query string parameter is downloaded as index.jpg

The optional vendor parameter identify that this is to store Vendor’s specific data. type can be media to store the additional media (image/video) in the media/ folder.

GET /research/{vendor}?q=gtin&force=0&nostore=0&url=imageUrl

1. vendor - the vendor to perform research
2. force - default is 0; research result will usually return from cache; set this to 1 to force it not to use cache
3. nostore - default is 0; set to 1 to not cache the research result
4. q - the gtin
5. url - optional: if you have the image URL already, pass it in to use instead of trying to perform additional research/API calls. Sometime, Vendor API requires multiple call to get both image and gtin. This help reduce the research API calls; so to not exceed Vendor’s API rate limit.
6. digits - optional valid values (12,13,14): research with UPC digits length for API requiring research not using GTIN.

Dicussion/Analysis

What we found during our API Integration with reguard to how others are storing their GTIN data

1. Tescolabs - We noticed that Tescolabs store image using last 3 digits of EAN number. Example: https://img.tesco.com/Groceries/pi/886/5000157024886/IDShot_540x540.jpg
   • Advantages: This may actually have faster cloud storage access than our strategy.
   • Disadvantages: The downside would be slower/harder to browse a local folder because of too many objects in each folder.
2. EANDATA - Like us, EANDATA segment its folder into 3 digits of a 13 digits EAN. It store the primary image as a full EAN number with the image extension. Example: https://eandata.com/image/products/004/900/000/0049000006582.jpg
   • Advantages: Like us, this make it easier to browse. It is also easier for website vendor to parse when using EAN as number. User can easily identify the image EAN because it can exists without the folder structure. It can also have good performance for cloud storage access.
   • Disadvantages: We find that, most of the time, Company Prefix digit (CP)/first digit in EAN is 0 (for/when working with US product/item). Not using this digit in folder structure may increase cloud storage access/segmentation.

Disclaimer

This project API integration code are written very genericly; in such way, that may violate certain Vendor’s API and Data Usage Policy. This is the reason why we segment Vendor data so User can purge per request of any Vendor. We also take additional step to segment API types, Primary/Secondary, to help User comply with majority of API.

We are not responsible for any mis-uses of Vendor’s API. User of our code must understand, fully comply and responsible for all external Vendor’s API and Data Usage Policy.

MIT

See LICENSE file.

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