Retail and e-commerce · Consumer goods
E-commerce price intelligence
Prices and availability change by country, city and sometimes network. A figure collected from the wrong place is not a competitor price, it is a different price.
The problem
- Retail sites localise prices, currency, delivery options and stock.
- Large catalogues mean millions of fetches, so a small drop in success rate becomes a large bill.
- Many retailers apply strict bot defences to product pages.
What to measure
- Match rate: share of tracked products where the collected price equals what a manual check in that market shows.
- Success rate and cost per successful page, per retailer.
- Freshness: time between a price change and your first observation of it.
The measurement method and the cost tool turn these into numbers you can compare.
Recommended products
Residential proxies
Country and city targeting returns the page a local shopper receives.
Web Scraper API
Moves retry and route selection off your side and gives you a cost per page.
Web Unblocker
For the handful of retailers where plain proxies fail, so you pay per request only where needed.
Be careful about
- Collect only what is publicly displayed. Do not authenticate to a retailer in a way its terms prohibit.
- Validate a sample by hand every cycle. Silent layout changes produce plausible wrong prices.
Your use must comply with the acceptable use policy. This page is operational guidance, not legal advice.
Questions
Which product should I start with?
Start with the Web Scraper API on a sample of your hardest retailers, then move high-volume easy retailers to direct proxies if the numbers favour it.
Test it on your own targets.
Create an account, run the measurement harness against your real workload, and read the numbers before you commit to anything.