Market Sentinel: Real-Time Competitive Pricing Intelligence

In high-velocity e-commerce and retail markets, being "outpriced" by even a few cents can result in massive revenue loss. The client needed to solve three critical data problems:

• Anti-Bot Defenses: Competitor websites used advanced tracking to block standard scrapers.

• Data Volume: Extracting pricing, stock levels, and promotional data for thousands of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) daily.

• Actionable Insights: Raw HTML is useless; the client needed structured, cleaned data fed directly into their decision-making dashboard.

The Solution (The Criyx Approach)

We built a resilient "Stealth Extraction" pipeline that operates under the radar:

1. Stealth Browser Automation: Used Playwright and Puppeteer with residential proxy rotation and "human-mimicry" headers to bypass Cloudflare and other sophisticated anti-scraping firewalls.

2. Distributed Extraction: Architected a distributed scraper that splits tasks across multiple nodes to ensure high-frequency updates (e.g., checking prices every 15 minutes) without overloading a single IP.

3. Data Cleaning & Normalization: Implemented a Python-based processing layer that cleans "noisy" web data, handles currency conversions, and maps inconsistent product titles to a unified internal database.

4. Real-Time Alerts: Integrated an n8n workflow that monitors the data for specific triggers—such as a competitor dropping a price by >10%—and instantly sends a priority alert to the client’s Slack.

The Tech Stack

• Scraping Frameworks: Python (Scrapy), Playwright, BeautifulSoup

• Proxy Management: Bright Data / Smartproxy (Residential & Mobile Proxies)

• Data Processing: Pandas / NumPy

• Infrastructure: Docker-based workers, n8n, PostgreSQL

The Impact

• 100% Data Accuracy: Replaced manual daily checks with a 24/7 automated "Watchman."

• Increased Margins: Enabled the client to raise prices on products where they were the sole stock-holder, and lower prices where they were being undercut.

• Market Agility: Reduced the "intelligence gap" from 24 hours to 15 minutes, allowing for true dynamic pricing.