Playbook: Validate a price/data API before you build tables on it

Playbook: Validate a price/data API before you build tables on it

Before you commit a review site to a data provider (Datafiniti / Keepa / a niche scraper API), run this 1-hour validation so you don't discover gaps after 200 tables are live.

— Pull your 20 actual products and check coverage. A provider with great Amazon data may have zero coverage of the DTC brands your niche reviews.
— Compare 5 returned prices against the live merchant page manually. Stale-by-3-days is fine; wrong-currency or MSRP-instead-of-sale is a dealbreaker.
— Test the failure mode: hit a SKU that doesn't exist. Does it 404 cleanly or return garbage you'd render into a table?
— Check the refresh frequency in the docs against your needs, and the rate limit against your pageview-to-call ratio with caching.
— Read the TOS on displaying their data publicly — some forbid showing prices on a monetized page.

Gotcha: free tiers often return cached prices hours stale while the dashboard shows "live" — verify with timestamps, not marketing claims.

Bottom line: test YOUR 20 products for coverage, verify 5 prices manually, check the not-found behavior and the display TOS. Coverage gaps are what sink data-driven review sites.