Project description
TranslatedWe run a retail business and sell a catalog of several hundred products that overlap significantly with the assortment of several competitor online stores. Currently our category managers check competitor prices manually a couple of times a week, transfer the numbers into a spreadsheet and try to react when someone sets a price lower than ours. It's slow, error-prone, and by the time we notice a price drop, we've already lost some sales. We want to replace this manual routine with an automated price monitoring system that tracks a specified list of competitor product pages on schedule, records each observed price in history and notifies us as soon as a significant change occurs.
The core of the project is reliable collection and comparison on schedule, not a universal parser. You will need to build a service that visits configured product URLs several times a day (mapped to our SKUs), extracts the current price and availability and writes a timestamped record so that a complete price history accumulates for each product and store. On top of this data you need change detection: when a competitor raises or lowers price beyond a threshold we set or when a product goes out of stock or back in stock, the system should raise an alert via email and messenger. We ask you to carefully account for real-world quirks of working with live stores: layout changes, temporary errors, retries and polite request pace so we don't get blocked.
All of this should come together in a dashboard where the team logs in and sees the current price for each product across all stores next to our price, with trend charts over days and weeks, filters by category and store, and a clear list of recent changes. We'd like to manage mapping of competitor pages to our SKUs through an interface, and be able to export history to CSV or Excel for deeper analysis.
— Price and availability collection on schedule from a customizable list of competitor product pages
— Complete price history with timestamps for each product and store
— Change detection by thresholds with alerts to email and messenger
— Dashboard with side-by-side comparison, trend charts, filters and change log
— Resilience to layout changes, retries, request pace and CSV/Excel export
The core of the project is reliable collection and comparison on schedule, not a universal parser. You will need to build a service that visits configured product URLs several times a day (mapped to our SKUs), extracts the current price and availability and writes a timestamped record so that a complete price history accumulates for each product and store. On top of this data you need change detection: when a competitor raises or lowers price beyond a threshold we set or when a product goes out of stock or back in stock, the system should raise an alert via email and messenger. We ask you to carefully account for real-world quirks of working with live stores: layout changes, temporary errors, retries and polite request pace so we don't get blocked.
All of this should come together in a dashboard where the team logs in and sees the current price for each product across all stores next to our price, with trend charts over days and weeks, filters by category and store, and a clear list of recent changes. We'd like to manage mapping of competitor pages to our SKUs through an interface, and be able to export history to CSV or Excel for deeper analysis.
— Price and availability collection on schedule from a customizable list of competitor product pages
— Complete price history with timestamps for each product and store
— Change detection by thresholds with alerts to email and messenger
— Dashboard with side-by-side comparison, trend charts, filters and change log
— Resilience to layout changes, retries, request pace and CSV/Excel export
Administration Cash, Bank transfer
