Can anyone think of a way to iniate a search on the product website for, say, the part number?

Sure, step one, figure out what that means in terms of protocols ( learn about the internet, Web Programming: For Beginners, to get an overall picture of how the internet works, how tcp/ip, sockets, websites, html, ajax, all fit together. ),

Step two, SMOP, whether that is opening a new search url of some sort, or http://perltuts.com/tutorials/web-scraping-with-lwp, or something else entirely