Retailer price monitoring

Apify worked with a leading manufacturer to implement a solution that allows the manufacturer to continuously monitor the prices of their products on the e-commerce websites that sell them to ensure they are never priced lower than the agreed minimum.

Challenge

As a manufacturer using multiple retailers to sell their products, our client needed a solution to give them continuous updates and constantly monitor whether their retailers were selling their products below the agreed minimum price.

Solution

Apify monitors all the customer's products on each retailer's e-commerce website. The monitored products from all websites are extracted daily and uploaded directly to the customer's database. The solution extracts 5 attributes for each product (name, ID, price, original price, and image), and monitors 20 e-commerce websites with 1,000 products each on average. The actors crawl 20,000 pages daily and 600,000 pages monthly.

Apify set up all actors (20 sites + 1 actor for uploading data to the customer database) within a month, and put automatic data monitoring in place. If a website changes its structure and an actor breaks (although many actors may work despite changes in structure), we fix it by the end of the next business day. The customer has an Apify account manager and access to Apify's Slack channel for any needs that may arise.

Benefits

Before working with Apify, the customer had a few junior analysts randomly checking products on a weekly basis. Our solution completely automated this process and increased the number of monitored products from 10% to 100%, and the frequency from weekly to daily. If any retailer lists any product for sale below the minimum price, our client knows within 24 hours.