Wikidata:Property proposal/Coles Online product ID

Coles Online product ID

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

   Not done

Description	unique identifier of a product sold via Coles Online
Represents	Coles Online product identifier (Q109361144)
Data type	External identifier
Domain	product (Q2424752)
Allowed values	\d{6,7}P+
Example 1	iceberg lettuce (Q1310886) → 4584071P
Example 2	bell pepper (Q1548030) → 4580208P
Example 3	bell pepper (Q1548030) → 7214862P
Example 4	Kalamata (Q6350358) → 5554156P
Formatter URL	https://shop.coles.com.au/search/resources/store/20529/productview/$1
See also	Amazon Standard Identification Number (P5749)
Applicable "stated in"-value	Coles Online (Q5144658)
Distinct-values constraint	yes
Wikidata project	WikiProject Australia (Q11036831)

Motivation

Provides information about mostly food products from one of the largest supermarket chains in Australia. This includes nutritional, price and occasionally usage and "market conditions" information. Dhx1 (talk) 14:02, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Discussion

• Thierry Caro 99of9 Canley Mattinbgn Samwilson JarrahTree ScottDavis Oronsay Pru.mitchell Bidgee Harryboyles Dhx1 SJK Nickw25 Danadl MargaretRDonald Nicolekearney Calistemon Eothan Evolution and evolvability REMerrick Atroche The-Pope Bjenks hfordsa SHB2000 AmandaSLawrence Chris.sherlock3
  Notified participants of WikiProject Australia --Dhx1 (talk) 14:02, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
•  Comment. Links do not work when in Paris. Thierry Caro (talk) 17:34, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

  Could you please try the new URL? Do you get an error response or timeout? Dhx1 (talk) 03:48, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

•  Comment. Demands Coles OnLine log-in. I tried again and got through to iceberg, but I still don't see how this is helpful worthwhile.--Oronsay (talk) 21:39, 2 November 2021 (UTC)
•  Neutral I'm usually gung-ho on identifiers, but even I'm concerned that this one may not be useful. I don't think it gives us much of an education about bell peppers, and I fear that Coles may change the names they use for products at any moment. I'm also not sure if this would set a precedent for every online store to need a property. (Nevermind the last point, I see Amazon has already set that precedent!) --99of9 (talk) 06:41, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

• @99of9: Identifiers such as this are used by [1], [2], [3], [4] and other price comparison websites. This wasn't the main purpose of proposing this property however. The main purpose of this proposal is more in support of the goals of Open Food Facts (Q3353146) which aims to collect data on the type of food products sold and marketed over time, and the nutritional content of foods. These identifiers are also useful to automate calculation of metrics for consumer price inflation or compare consumer prices (particularly fresh produce) across different locations, similar to the methodology of [5] but admittedly without Internet Archive caching pages, there is no way (without using another service such as PriceHipster) to verify point in time pricing when prices change on a weekly basis. --Dhx1 (talk) 03:20, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

•  Support OK, I'm in, mostly based on the change to the likely-stable product ID. The JSON is not very readable to humans, but this is Wikidata... it could have very interesting uses for computer analysis of pricing. --99of9 (talk) 07:21, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

•  Comment Proposal updated to use product IDs rather than SEO friendly product strings. Formatter URL updated to JSON blob that returns product data including pricing (local to the selected store for the formatter URL which is Richmond South, Victoria chosen because it is closest to where the first Coles store was located in Collingwood, Melbourne), Global Trade Item Number (P3962)'s, supplier names, product weights, links to product images, ingredients, nutrition information, etc. Product IDs are used nationally. Per [6] it appears that Coles are supportive of allowing this data to be made accessible to various third party applications used for price comparisons hence the product IDs appear to be stable and planned to be made available for some time to come. The only issue I see is that Internet Archive is blocked from caching pages so if Coles did change/hide their product IDs in the future (e.g. in favour of the SEO friendly product strings) we wouldn't have any historical data for these IDs to link to. --Dhx1 (talk) 02:33, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

• @Dhx1, Thierry Caro, Oronsay, 99of9:  Not done: Website currently unavailable. —MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 20:17, 16 April 2022 (UTC)

  @MasterRus21thCentury: I can see that accessing the sample URLs from outside Australia (e.g. via 12ft.io and web.archive.org) provides a response of "Coles Online is not available in your country or access has been blocked". Is this the error you receive? If Coles is going to be user hostile with their use of geo blocking then I have no interest in supporting this property nor any other related to Coles. Dhx1 (talk) 02:28, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

  Answer I'm from Russia. Does your site work? MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 17:49, 17 April 2022 (UTC)