Hi all, fairly new to n8n but understand the concepts as a developer and UiPath certified. I am completing the following project for a friend who runs a warehouse and im looking for some advice please.
I have the project up and running and it works fairly well but im sure it can be refined. I currently am getting alot of ebay results which arent helpful in this context. I am planning to build a seperate ebay automation which I would then charge for but thats not for this question.
Current Steps Involved:
Fetching part number and price from google sheet
Performing a SerpApi google search (via http node) for part number and sellers
Various filtering of results based on price, results location (ebay/gumtree)
Google maps SerpApi search (via http node) for business details based on results from earlier search
Fltering results based on quality of business details
Writing a ‘lead’ object to google sheets for every result remaining after filtering.
My questions are mainly around the searches.
Is there a more efficient way to retrieve business details than a google maps SerpApi http node?
If there is not, are there any fancy hidden tricks people are using for a similar sort of thing to manipulate results from SerpApi?
Id also be extremely interested in how anyone else might approach this kind of lead generation automation if they were tasked with it. The simple user story is as follows:
I have excess parts in my warehouse, I want to quickly find potential leads to sell them on to.
I input part number and extra term (such as ‘for sale’, ‘reseller’) and a price where i want to filter results below that price.
The automation searches for resellers, filters them based on price and then returns business details of those resellers.
Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Welcome @Ben_Goodwin
Nice, this is a topic I’ve recently been really interested in!
On SerpAPI
Generally for SerpAPI because it’s google underneath, I found using Google Search Operators to be a powerful way to get closer to the results you want. So for your example:
site:<url> could scope to only sites you care about
loc:<city> could restrict to a local region or city
So experimenting with something like: (site:ebay.co.uk OR site:gumtree.com) loc:sheffield intitle:<part> (intext:"for sale" OR intext:"reseller") <price>
could help reduce the amount of manual filtering you’d have to do.
On Business Search
This is a tricky one but I would imagine you’d want to get these details from the local authority/gov website? Google map results are a great starting point but a lot of the time it’s autogenerated so data could be patchy. One approach could be to:
Try to get company registration number off their shop page or terms & conditions on their website
Do a search on a gov website or on a third-party company database.
Results could be mixed depending on how you’d go about scraping this information. Personally, I’d use an AI-powered website crawler for this task - definitely would recommend Oskar’s tutorial on his AI crawler for something like this.
Thanks for a detailed response. The search operators could indeed be very helpful. Thanks for the idea.
I will certainly take a look at the ai crawler as it seems ideal for this use case to filter out all of the noise that the initial SerpApi search returns.
