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How an Agribusiness Achieved E-commerce Precision with Web Scraping

Overview

Our partner is a marketing and analytics firm based in Australia, specializing in e-commerce and retail. They help clients with tasks like tracking competitor prices, collecting product data, and building strategies across the four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

 

Web scraping became the practical solution for collecting reliable, up-to-date data from e-commerce sites—critical for turning ideas into action.

 

One of their clients, a rapidly growing agribusiness, sells primarily online. To stay competitive, they needed accurate, up-to-date product information across multiple platforms. 

 

They ran into a fundamental challenge: product listings weren’t consistent. Prices, descriptions, and availability shifted from one site to the next, making it hard to track performance or respond to changes in the market.

 

This lack of standardized data made it hard to track performance, adjust prices quickly, and provide a smooth customer experience. Without accurate data, they risked falling behind competitors who were already optimizing their listings across multiple channels.

Overview-Agribusiness-Customer-Story
Key points
  • Due to varying formats and lack of standardized updates across multiple e-commerce platforms, product data such as pricing, descriptions, and availability often become inconsistent, making it difficult to maintain uniformity across listings.
  • Without web scraping, it becomes nearly impossible to track real-time data updates like price fluctuations or stock changes, putting retailers at a disadvantage when it comes to staying competitive in the market.
  • Manually gathering product details from numerous sites is a time-consuming and error-prone process, making it inefficient to collect and aggregate data on multiple SKUs for meaningful analysis and strategy development.
  • Without automated data collection, businesses struggle to quickly adjust their pricing and promotional strategies in response to market changes, leading to missed opportunities and potential loss of market share.

Challenges

This e-commerce web scraping use case focused on mapping detailed product information for diverse agribusiness categories—such as specialty coffee, grains, and natural food products—across multiple e-commerce platforms in Australia and New Zealand. 

The task seemed straightforward at first: our partner gave us a list of SKUs—including both their own products and those of competitors—and we extracted matching product details from six different sites.

Our crawlers searched each website for the SKUs, matched results with the provided product names, and extracted the relevant data whenever there was an exact match.

But even a use case that appears simple on paper can surface unexpected hurdles—ones that in-house teams may not foresee.

One such request was to generate separate files for each product category—around 500 a day. While manageable on our end, it posed a logistical challenge for the client in terms of organizing and using the data effectively.

And that wasn’t even the hard part.

The real obstacle came from anti-bot defenses on certain sites. Some employed geo-targeting and strict rate limiting, which significantly restricted the number of allowable requests—making large-scale extraction nearly impossible without advanced infrastructure.

And that’s precisely why they came to us.

Reliable and easy communication!

Our data project, if we hadn’t automated through GREPSR, would take weeks to complete each month. Working through GREPSR is as easy as it gets. The data comes to us neatly packaged and downloadable. We can reach the representatives easily when we need changes or assistance. The pricing is good.

Verified G2 user Ecommerce

100 %

Automation of Daily Extraction Pipeline

95 %

Match Accuracy Across 10+ Websites

3 x

Faster Response to Competitor Price Changes

Solutions

It’s easy to understand the upfront cost of purchasing a service. What’s harder to anticipate are the hidden operational and opportunity costs that surface once the work begins.

One such challenge was managing the volume of files. Delivering 500 files per day—one for each product category—was technically correct but operationally inefficient. It required significant manpower and introduced backend complexity for both teams.

We proposed a simpler, smarter alternative: consolidate daily extractions into a single file, and embed filters that allow sorting by product category. This allowed our partner to focus their time on working with the data—not wrangling it.

The second challenge—anti-bot defenses—was a different beast. Several target sites had strict geo-location targeting and rate limits, which restricted how many requests could be made from a given region or IP.

Overcoming these defenses requires more than just proxies. It demands robust scraping infrastructure, dynamic IP rotation, and engineers capable of spinning up virtual machines in parallel—all without triggering detection. That’s exactly what we’re built for.

In the end, we delivered a fully automated system that extracted all required data points—accurately and efficiently. Our partner was able to deliver results to their client without delays or manual intervention.

A win-win, all around.

 

Solutions

Similar challenges faced across the industry:

Lack of technical know-how to automate routine data extractions

Businesses need fresh data to gather the best insights. To that end, one or two data extractions a day does not suffice. They need a system that can easily schedule crawl runs at specific intervals, as well as on demand.

Lack of resources - time, money and manpower - for data sourcing at scale

Data extraction is extremely tedious and highly error-prone. Most businesses lack the infrastructure to perform high volumes of data sourcing, and at a quality that yields the best results.

Overcoming data source restrictions

Most websites place limits on how many requests can be made in a set time period, and regularly block bots from accessing their content.

PROCESS

Getting started with Grepsr

Start with Grepsr in a few easy steps. Leave the data sourcing heavy lifting to us, so you can focus on innovation and growth.

1

Initial project consultation

First, we'll discuss the specifics of your web data needs and the KPIs you would like to have in order to ensure successful project execution.

2

Instrument web crawlers

We'll then set up automated extractions specific to your use-case, and send you a sample dataset before moving on to a full-scale crawl.

3

Begin data collection

Once you've approved the sample data, we will start scaling and performing the full run, and deliver the data in the agreed timeframe.

4

Hassle-free maintenance

Our team will ensure that all subsequent runs are running well, and that your data is delivered as scheduled with the least disruption.

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