PricePulse
An automated competitor price tracking platform enabling real-time market intelligence for e-commerce businesses with daily scraping, price alerts, and exportable reports.
- Client
- Retail Insights Co.
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Type
- Data Scraping
- Year
- 2024
- Our role
- Backend
- Timeline
- 2 months
- Team
- 2 developers
Overview
Retail Insights Co. manually tracked 200+ competitor prices weekly, spending 15+ hours per week on research.
Process.
- Built scalable scraping workers using Puppeteer, scheduled jobs with cron, implemented failure recovery, and created a dashboard for visualizing price trends and competitor activity.
What we built.
- featAutomated daily scraping of competitor prices from 10+ platforms
- featReal-time price change alerts (SMS/email/Slack)
- featHistorical price tracking with trend analysis
- featCompetitor product mapping
- featExportable reports (CSV, PDF)
- featPrice elasticity analysis
Hard parts.
fixAnti-bot protections and blocking
Implemented rotating proxies, randomized user agents, added request throttling, and used headless browser (Puppeteer) to mimic human behavior. Success rate improved to 94%.
fixWebsite structure changes breaking scrapers
Built modular scraper architecture with fallback selectors, added automated failure detection, and created alerts for selector failures. Recovery time reduced to <2 hours.
fixHandling 200+ products and scaling
Implemented parallel scraping with 20 concurrent workers, optimized database queries, and added smart scheduling (high-priority products more frequently). Cycle time reduced to 45 minutes.
fixData accuracy and missing products
Added out-of-stock detection, implemented data validation rules, created duplicate detection, and added manual review queue for anomalies. Data completeness improved to 99.2%.
Built with
Node.js Puppeteer MongoDB Express
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