Grocer Survey 2.0

• 

  Alan6984 on 21/10/2023 - 00:14

  +2

  I always found the site to be too hard to bother with myself - maybe they have improved it, but I haven't gone back to look.

  For me, I want to be able to have a list of items setup in an account, and it shows me the lowest price for each item - not everyone's price. That way I can decide which shop to go to today / this week.

  Can't imagine a scenario where I'd pay / subscribe though.

  • 

    Plug on 21/10/2023 - 00:21

    +1

    It has a shopping list function. The site has never shown you every store's price, only the ones that you select.

    • 

      Alan6984 on 21/10/2023 - 00:30

      My recollection must be off - I seemed to remember not being able to create an account, but as I said above, they must have improved it if you can do that now (or you always could and I just missed it).

      • 

        Plug on 21/10/2023 - 01:39

        +1

        There is no account, but it will save items at least until your cookies get cleared

        • 

          Alan6984 on 21/10/2023 - 12:03

          @Plug: That must have been it.

  • 

    Foodie on 25/10/2023 - 20:27

    My ability to scan barcodes hasnt worked for a while, its a bit frustrating.

• 

  Surreal on 21/10/2023 - 15:28

  +1

  I love it but i dont have the time to go to different shops so its kinda missing a cheapies feature i need :

  If i go to Pak N Save XX today, what is the list of my favourites that i should buy based on their price history and the price at my other selected shops.

  And of course a way to group equivalent products - budget brand tin tomatoes etc, bulk vs packaged dry goods being often equivalent.

• 

  LupinS on 26/10/2023 - 09:07

  +1

  Pity they didn't give a write in. I'm not joining discord just to give the feedback (not just "what can we charge you?"

  Isn't a horrible.app, but drops all the selected stores frequently, and really needs to group by area ("New World Metro" - which one!?). As a result I only use it when I can be bothered going and reselecting all the stores - so only when I'm looking for something specific.

  • 

    mpc on 26/10/2023 - 10:05

    +1

    +1 for this. The stores should be grouped by region to make it far easier to select only the ones that apply

  • 

    Alan6984 on 26/10/2023 - 13:01

    +1

    Totally agree on both points - have a login so you don't lose your settings, and group by area (or maybe choose a store and it selects the twenty closest around you, or anything within 5km say - better yet, make it an option you choose).

  • 

    NovaAlpha on 22/01/2024 - 16:48

    +4

    I'm not the developer of Grocer, but I believe the reason the stores are dropped is because whenever the Grocer server goes through an update, the client side (i.e your endpoint devices like laptop or phone or whatever) will also need to do the same. That's why you get that popup to reload the page. However, sometimes it forces the cookies stored on your device to be deleted, which is where all your saved store data goes. The app kinda sucks, it should have a login to store your settings, but it doesn't.

    However, there are a few workarounds for this. The first is to use PriceGrabber (pricegrabber.co.nz). This was posted on Cheapies and it lets you create a login and configure Grocer settings. It's much better imo, as it searches not just groceries, but many other stores for other things as well. I've already found a few good deals just by using it. PriceSpy and PriceMe is good sometimes, but Price Grabber can find things that those can't.

    Note that PriceGrabber doesn't list all the stores. Some Countdown that have been rebranded to Woolworths do not show up in PriceGrabber, e.g. Pt Chevalier Countdown. It also doesn't show The Warehouse or Fresh Choice stores, etc.

    The other workarounds are:

    • Use a highlight text Chrome extension. There's a very good one called Highlight This (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/highlight-this-find…) but it's not free and is subscription based (yuck). I reverse engineered it so I'm using it for free, but I'm not going to share it here because I'm not here to promote piracy. You can reverse engineer it yourself, or find a similar extension if you want. The point is, you create a list of keywords that you want to highlight and once saved, it'll automatically highlight the words for you. It's very powerful and I use this quite heavily at my job, as it helps with looking at logs and reports etc. Here's an example of what that looks like:

    https://imgur.com/a/YfMwCBW
    https://imgur.com/ijNpRFP

    Then, you can simply tick the ones that are highlighted, without having to search.

    • The other solution is to use a userscript. Luckily, I've created one which I'll share here - https://pastebin.com/Sma9KBHv

    Install something like Tampermonkey or ViolentMonkey and load up the userscript and you're ready to go. It's kinda quirty though, but here's an example to help you get started:

    1. Go to https://grocer.nz/stores
    2. Immediately click on the Countdown tab

    As long as you do this within 2 seconds of the page being loaded, then you should find that tickboxes are ticked automatically. If it doesn't work, just refresh the page and try again, OR you can adjust the delay from 2 seconds to something higher in the script.

    Why is the delay needed? Because by default, you load into grocer.nz, not grocer.nz/stores. Even when you browse to grocer.nz/stores, it defaults to your Favourites page. In order for my script to detect the buttons to click on, you need to be in the right tab (e.g. Countdown). So the 2 seconds delay is there to wait for you go into the right tab, then it will tick the tickboxes.

    The problem is that even though the tickboxes are ticked, it doesn't mean they are enabled. This is done using another method and I couldn't be bothered figuring it out. So just note that the tick on the tickbox is not confirmed. So what you'll need to do is to look for the tickboxes that are ticked, then untick and tick them manually and you should be good.

    Remember, you'll need to refresh the page and then go into the right tab for Countdown, New World, Pak'n Save, etc. A bit of a hassle, but at least the tickboxes are ticked to help you know which ones to manually tick yourself.

    You can of course edit the script to include the stores that you care about.

    • 

      Alan6984 on 22/01/2024 - 19:32

      Great post NovaAlpha!

• 

  Grandma on 26/10/2023 - 10:09

  Bug on android 14 has meant that buttons highlights as text instead. No longer able to use

  • 

    NovaAlpha on 22/01/2024 - 20:37

    I'm on Android 14 and it's fine.

    Grocer itself is not an app, even though you can download it from the Play Store. All it does is it uses the Chrome Webview wrapper. It's not really a native app with its own browser rendering engine. In fact, if you set your default Android browser to e.g. Opera and you go to grocer.nz/stores and you set all your favourite stores. The next time you open Opera, the settings will remain. HOWEVER, if you delete Opera or clear the data for grocer.nz, everything is lost and you'd have to re-configure your stores again. Why is this important? Well, if you've already configured the stores in your default browser, Grocer will automatically pick them up - because again it's just a wrapper and it uses the same cookies as your default browser.

    There's actually no point downloading Grocer app. Just save grocer.nz as a Favourite in your browser. For your issue, you might need to clear grocer.nz data from your default browser and then try again. It's definitely working fine on Android 13 and 14. Tested on Xiaomi.EU, LineageOS and stock MIUI.

    • 

      akrotohur on 22/01/2024 - 20:51

      That's what I've been doing, don't understand why many people call it an "app" or download the app, I always tell people to just use the website with a browser. But it's a pain when switching to another machine, can't migrate the indexeddb.

      • 

        NovaAlpha on 22/01/2024 - 21:53

        +2

        It depends on what the app does. Some are just wrappers, while some actually provide additional features. I guess most people aren't techy and just think that apps are whatever you download from the Play Store or App Store, which is true in itself.

        Regarding indexddb, why can't you migrate it? I'm assuming you're referring to getting this file on Windows. In which case, it should be located here:

        chrome://indexeddb-internals

        You can download the DB data for the individual site and just restore it. OR, the easier approach would be to just back this up and restore it:
        %localappdata%/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default/IndexedDb

        Of course, it depends on the browser you're using. However, all Chromium based browsers are pretty much structured the same.

        At a guess, I'm guessing that you've tried the above already, but it probably didn't work for you because of Chromium browser's notorious issue - encryption. You can't migrate Chromium based browser data from one machine to another. Well, turns out that you can do this.

        I personally recommend and use UnGoogled Chromium. Here's the link:
        https://portapps.io/app/ungoogled-chromium-portable/

        Create a shortcut to the binary .exe file and edit the shortcut properties to something like this:
        "D:\Portable Apps\1. Browsers\UnGoogled_Chromium\ungoogled-chromium-portable.exe" —no-default-browser-check —disable-logging —disable-breakpad —disable-machine-id —disable-encryption-win

        The keywords here are —disable-encryption-win and —disable-machine-id. Once you have this set, launch the shortcut and whatever extensions you install, whatever settings you configure, they will all be there when you move this installation folder to another PC. I have about 300+ extensions and I don't have to waste time configuring them at all. I also don't have to deal with the crappy Google Chrome backup/sync feature, as that doesn't restore extensions and their settings 100%. Of course, any cookies and sites data such as Grocer are retained for me.

        Just note that you may need to sideload Chromium Web Store if you use UnGoogled Chromium, as it strips out a lot of Google Chrome related crap. However, other browsers that are Chromium based should also work, as long as you can find them on Portapps.io and more importantly, supports disabling encryption as per the arguments.

        Alternatively, just use portable Firefox. It doesn't have any encryption related issues. I still use it every now and then for container tabs, which is useful for my job. Wish Chromium browsers support this feature…

        P.S - Off topic, but I always recommend people to use portable versions of the app if possible. Much easier to manage and backup. Just keep them on a separate drive volume. Keep your C:\ drive as lean and clean as possible and backup should only take a few minutes. My C:\ drive has about 200 apps installed, about 150GB used and backup takes literally 5 minutes. My PC is highly optimized and runs fast. That's because I don't keep the rest of my apps installed into C:. The rest are in their portable folders and can be accessed easily from D:.

    • 

      Grandma on 23/01/2024 - 09:25

      I get what you mean, but I really dont know enough about writing (idk what is this maybe react native?) to know if thats something that can be fixed