What It Is

The Book Pricing System is a small application designed for a small business. Implementing a super-ultra-secret algorithm involving a complex mathematical procedure called "addition", it automates the pricing of an item for Amazon's marketplace.

BPS will fetch information about other sellers' offers for the same item, wave a magic wand over it and determine a price range to sell the item at for maxium profit.

The goal when creating BPS was to create an interface that displayed relevent information quickly, useful information to be accesible but not "in the way". It was accomplished with a large portion of the screen taken up by the offers and the prices for each offer. Useful information is located along the right side of the screen where most modern applications will place toolbars, information dialogs, and so forth.

Color is an important tool as well. Muted and dull colors indicate an "off" or "no", while brighter and lighter colors indicate the system is "on".

BPS does not store any data locally and relies on Amazon's E-Commerce (now known as A2S (now known as PAA)) to supply information for an item. This is a concious choice.

BPS is written in Perl, using the Catalyst MVC framework for server-side implmentation. Template::Toolkit handles translating boring perl data structures into pretty HTML. Basic hand-written javascript is responsible for the client-side implementation.

Screenshots

The main application screen

The main application bar, before input

Basic information about the item

Warning list. Useful, but out of the way

Offer weight and (running total), and a simple count

The offers themselves where the counts suggested are reached and the system suggests a price range.

Finally, our suggested price range and the counts used to get there.