Retail Giant Uses Web Scraping to Optimize Global Pricing

Client Overview

A renowned retailer with multiple shops and an extensive online retail network that has a global presence. The client wants to maximize profit, revenue, and market share in the international market as they are mainly dealing with a large amount of customer, sales, inventory, and marketing data daily.

Client Requirements:

The client wants an innovative automated solution to make data-driven decisions for a retail business. The client’s prime requirements were:

• Monitor competitor prices and strategy, in real-time, to gain more profit globally.
• Use an automated solution that helps to boost revenue.
• Use of dynamic pricing strategies using AI.
• Scrape popular websites of global retailers and get clickable localized market insights.
• Track availability and prices of similar products by extracting retailers’ websites.
• Gather structured data that can drive business success.
• Provide the decision maker a dashboard that gives an overview of pricing gaps, market trends, and hence automates the decision-making process.
  

Challenges:

Global Website Variability: Because pricing formats, currencies, and page structure vary according to countries, there was a need for customized scrapers for each region.

Legal and Compliance law framework: Issue was related to legal and compliance. Pricing must comply with privacy data laws as well as terms and conditions. This was a difficult task due to the fact that they vary globally.

Freshness of Data: Outdated data always misleads. There was a need for a powerful tool that can scrape data accurately

Anti-Bot Measures: Competitor’s websites were using security mechanisms such as CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, or user-agent detection. This makes large scale scraping hard.

Demand of Resources: Developing a scraper that can handle thousands of SKUs was challenging and demanded resources.

Difficulties in matching products: Finding similar products across different websites was tough because of their inconsistency in naming and listings.

Solutions

1. Rotating Proxies and Residential IP Address: Use of rotating proxies with residential IP addresses can help to bypass IP blocking.
2. Auto-Healing Scrapers: Develop rule-based algorithms that can grasp HTML changes automatically.
3. Cloud-based scalability: Build a complete scraping cloud setup on AWS, GCP for scaling, data collection, and reliability.
4. Data Duplication: Build a pipeline that removes duplicate data and provides only relevant unique data before moving further.
5. Legal Safeguards & Compliance Monitoring: Work with legal team so that scraping process can be compliant with GDPR and CCPA laws and terms and conditions of targeted website.
6. Language Normalization: Implement language translation API to standardize data across languages.

Conclusion

X-Byte Enterprise Crawling guides the customer thoroughly on how to increase business presence and optimize price globally, which varies from one site to another. This client requirement has created new innovation in scraping large retail businesses’ websites and optimizing global prices.