Next Gen System
Case 06 London ECOMMERCE · WEB SCRAPING
Market Intel Web Scraping + Ranking Feed
Compliant collection pipelines that feed recommendation and pricing decisions with fresh competitive data.
01 — Context
The Client’s Story
Category managers tracked competitor price and assortment in spreadsheets that went stale by afternoon. Manual checks could not keep up with promotions across dozens of sites.
By the time a promo was spotted, merchandising had already set a price that looked wrong on the shelf. The team needed same-day visibility on priority categories—not a weekly PDF dump.
Legal and terms boundaries mattered. Collection had to stay inside approved public fields, with counsel in the loop before scale.
02 — Ambition
Objectives
Collect approved public pricing and assortment fields on a reliable cadence, with monitoring when a site layout shifts.
Land clean structured feeds in the warehouse for ranking and alerts—quality sampled, not silently incomplete.
Stay within legal and terms boundaries reviewed with counsel, so growth does not create surprise risk.
03 — Friction
Challenges
Site layout churn and anti-bot friction made brittle scrapers fail without warning.
Field schema drifted across brands; a missing price field had to fail loudly instead of writing nulls that looked like “free.”
Quality sampling was mandatory—incomplete pulls must never overwrite good yesterday data.
04 — Approach
Solution
We built monitored web scraping collectors with retries, schema validation, and quality sampling. Clean feeds power internal recommendation and pricing alerts.
Failures page owners. Incomplete runs never silently overwrite yesterday’s good data. Schema contracts version with the warehouse tables they feed.
Category leads get a simple status board: last good run, fields missing, and which sites need selector attention this week.
05 — Outcomes
Results
Priority categories gained same-day competitive visibility, spreadsheet hunts dropped, and the feed became a trusted input for the recommendation roadmap.
- Same-day competitive visibility on priority categories.
- Fewer manual spreadsheet hunts for promo checks.
- A trusted input layer for the recommendation systems roadmap.
06 — Forward
What’s Next
Wire the feed into a production recommendation ranking model with offline evals, so price and assortment signals influence ranking only after they clear quality gates.
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