Case
Competitor price monitoring
Competitors' websites are matched against the price list by article number, automatically.
≈ the owner's estimate from his own experience
Before
Competitors' price changes were heard about from sales managers, once a client had already said "it is cheaper over there". Checking five websites by hand across the whole price list is impossible.
What I built
- Five competitors' websites are read regularly.
- Products are matched against our price list by article number, not by name.
- A price change of more than one percent lands in a report; the rest the system does not show, so that there is no noise.
After
A report covering five websites arrives by itself. Looking through it takes a minute.
What it gave
Prices are adjusted before a client points them out. The sales managers no longer "have heard" — they know.
For your company
How many sites to watch and how often is your decision: five or twenty, daily or once a week. So is the threshold at which a change reaches the report: mine is one percent, because the price list is large and small movements are noise. Matching can be by article number, barcode or name — it depends on how your catalogue is built.
Stack: Python, website parsing, matching by article number
Related service: Analytics and control