About the site author
Mark Daniels is a jack-of-all-trades, based in Serbia for reasons known only to himself, who among other things happens to enjoy a bit of webĀ coding, mostly in PHP/JS. Other similar projects of his are The Storeminator and Wordbay.
About UPCZilla
UPCZilla started life as a hobby project based on the Storeminator WordPress plugin, a bit of codeĀ designed toĀ generateĀ price comparison listings from various sources around the web. At some point Mark realised thatĀ the code could be adapted to create an online database of UPC product codes (and probably of other codes in the future, like EANs etc.). Although there were a few sites around like it already, they seemed to lack a friendly user interface, especially one that would allow users to reverse-search for UPCs based on keywords they would enter. Now the site is growing rapidly as more and more UPCs are entering the system, and some plans will have to be made for expansion in the near future.
A handy side-effect of having UPCs is that you can match products across a range of retailers and so compare prices for the same product, and so a major part of UPCZilla’s functionality revolves around the price comparison algorithm, and producing the useful price comparison listing you see below each product. We will also try to add other useful product information as-and-when (and possibly bar-codes too, if this does not hog too many resources).
Mission
The mission of UPCZilla is to provide a quick, intuitive and comprehensive search serviceĀ allowing users to easily find the product information they are looking for.
Credits
Some of the data in our database was sourced from theĀ Product Open Data projectĀ (especially a lot of grocery items), so credit goes to those guys for their great work.