Client Success Story

Automated Pricing Intelligence & Competitor Benchmarking for a Global Online Printing Solutions Provider

90%

reduction in manual research effort

Deployed a fully automated data scraping and processing pipeline

Service

  • Website Data Scraping Services
  • Data Collection Services

Platform

  • Custom Web Scraping
THE CLIENT

A Global Online Printing Solutions Provider

With a strong presence across North America and Europe, this company specializes in customizable print products for a diverse clientele, ranging from independent authors and creative professionals to large enterprises. Their mission is to make printing easy, accessible, and affordable by combining competitive pricing, high-quality materials, and exceptional customer service. Leveraging both digital and offset printing technologies, they have become a trusted partner for businesses seeking reliable, professional printing solutions.

PROJECT REQUIREMENTS

Benchmarking Market Pricing across 1500+ Product Variations

To ensure competitive positioning in a highly price-sensitive market, the client required a comprehensive competitor pricing and delivery benchmark spanning ten of their industry’s largest online printing providers, demanding large-scale data collection services.

The scope of work involved:

  • Product Categories: Perfect Bound Books, Saddle Stitch Books, Booklets, Spiral Bound Books, Wedding Photo Books, and Hardback Books.
  • Configuration Coverage: 1500 total variations created by combining key attributes:
    • Paper type: matte, silk, glossy
    • Cover material type
    • Printing mode: color vs. black-and-white
    • Binding type
    • Size/format
    • Order quantity
  • Delivery Timelines: Standard and express pricing for every configuration.
  • Benchmarking Criteria: Data captured for each variation included:
    • Base price
    • Price impact of delivery speed
    • Service features included in the quoted price

The final output needed to provide accurate, structured, and directly comparable pricing data across all vendors, enabling the client to identify underperforming price points, detect service-level gaps, and adjust offerings accordingly. This project mainly required web scraping, processing market research data, automated data validation supported by human supervision, and data standardization services.

PROJECT CHALLENGES

Building a Reliable, Scalable Competitive Intelligence Pipeline

Gathering large-scale, accurate competitor data for this client came with several challenges –

  • Dynamic Website Architectures

    Many competitor websites used AJAX-based forms, JavaScript-rendered content, and multi-step configuration flows, making standard scraping methods ineffective.

  • Data Normalization Complexity

    Competitors presented pricing in varied formats, requiring a unified data schema for meaningful comparison.

  • Risk of Data becoming Outdated

    The client needed fresh, accurate pricing data every month without manual intervention.

  • Quality Assurance

    Any inaccuracies in competitor pricing intelligence could lead to misinformed pricing strategies, impacting revenue and customer perception.

OUR SOLUTION

A Fully Automated, Scalable Web Scraping and Data Validation Framework

To meet the client’s ambitious goal of benchmarking 1500+ product variations across ten competitor platforms without sacrificing speed or accuracy, we designed a custom-built, automation-first pricing intelligence pipeline. We customized our website data scraping services to handle both static and dynamic competitor platforms.

1

Technology Stack Optimized for Diverse Websites

  • Requests + BeautifulSoup for fast, low-overhead HTML extraction on static pages.
  • Selenium with headless Chrome/Firefox browsers for JavaScript-intensive competitor sites where pricing and delivery options were dynamically rendered.
  • Modular, vendor-specific scripts that allowed us to plug in new competitors or adjust existing logic without affecting the entire workflow.
2

Intelligent Configuration Mapping

  • We reverse-engineered each vendor’s website to understand the exact request/response patterns used when customers selected options like paper type, binding, or size.
  • Each of the 1500 configurations was mapped to vendor-specific queries or form submissions, ensuring that every possible combination was accurately captured.
  • Special logic was created to handle edge cases, such as unavailable combinations or bulk quantity discounts, to reflect true market pricing conditions.
3

Data Normalization & Schema Standardization

  • Extracted data was normalized into a unified pricing schema, ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons between vendors, regardless of how they presented their pricing.
  • Delivery timelines were standardized into defined tiers (e.g., Standard, Express, Next-Day) to avoid misalignment in service level comparisons.
  • Metadata, such as timestamp and vendor source, was attached to every record to maintain data lineage and auditability.
4

Automation & Monthly Delivery Cadence

  • The scraping process was fully automated using cron jobs on a secure VPS environment, enabling unattended monthly data refreshes.
  • Output formats included both CSV and JSON, giving the client flexibility to integrate the dataset into existing analytics tools or dashboards.
  • A version-controlled repository tracked changes in scraping logic, ensuring quick rollback and adaptability when competitor sites updated their UI or backend structures.
5

Error Handling & Resilience

  • Built-in retry logic with exponential backoff handled temporary site outages or throttling.
  • Real-time logging and email alerts notified our team instantly of any anomalies in scraping runs.
6

Multi-Stage Quality Assurance with Humans-in-the-Loop

  • Automated validation scripts flagged missing or inconsistent values.
  • A dedicated human verification team reviewed the dataset line-by-line, cross-referencing with live competitor sites to ensure 100% accuracy before delivery.
  • This dual-layer QA ensured that every insight the client acted upon was accurate, complete, and reliable.
7

Scalable for Future Growth

  • The pipeline was designed to scale horizontally, meaning additional competitor sites or new product categories could be added with minimal engineering effort.
  • Our modular approach meant the client could extend benchmarking to other print products or geographies without rebuilding the system.
Project Outcomes

Enabling Faster Competitive Pricing Intelligence with Web Scraping Services

High-Volume, Accurate Data Extraction

Captured and validated pricing and delivery data for 1500+ unique product configurations across ten competitor platforms on a monthly basis, ensuring a consistent and up-to-date benchmark dataset.

Scalable, Repeatable Intelligence Process

Deployed a fully automated scraping and processing pipeline, designed to scale seamlessly to additional products, geographies, or competitor sites with minimal engineering effort.

Data-driven Competitive Pricing Strategy

Enabled data-driven, actionable intelligence that supported strategic price adjustments, service-level enhancements, and improved market positioning.

Reduced Manual Effort by 90%

Reduced manual effort for the client’s internal team by 90%, replacing time-intensive research with hands-off, reliable, and regularly scheduled intelligence delivery

This solution has completely transformed how we approach competitor benchmarking. The monthly updates are fast, accurate, and require no extra work from our side. It’s given us the clarity to make smarter, faster pricing decisions.

- VP, Marketing & Business Insights

CONTACT US

Transform How You Track Competitors

Gain precise, actionable market insights without the manual workload. Outsource web scraping services or market research & data processing services to SunTec India and get custom data extraction solutions for pricing intelligence, competitor benchmarking, or any particular use case.