Automated Price Tracking and BuyBox Monitoring System for E-Commerce Marketplaces

The client faces difficulties in maintaining up-to-date pricing information and identifying BuyBox winners across multiple products on marketplace platforms, leading to suboptimal pricing decisions, reduced competitiveness, and potential revenue loss. Manual monitoring is time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies, hindering real-time strategic adjustments.

A mid-sized online retail company operating on marketplace platforms seeking to optimize competitive pricing strategies.

• Develop a scalable software solution to automatically retrieve and analyze current product prices and BuyBox status on targeted marketplace platforms.
• Implement periodic data collection for a large volume of product identifiers (ASINs), with adjustable frequency from 1 to 24 hours.
• Maintain an up-to-date internal database or data store with the lowest prices and BuyBox status to inform dynamic pricing strategies.
• Enable real-time access to fresh pricing data to support timely business decisions, with a goal to improve operational efficiency and sales performance.
• Achieve automation that reduces manual effort and increases monitoring accuracy, contributing to sales growth estimated at around 10%.

• Automated retrieval of product identifiers (e.g., ASINs) from an editable data source (e.g., cloud-based spreadsheet or database).
• Periodic data scraping and retrieval of current prices, lowest historical prices over a specified period (e.g., 30 days), and BuyBox winner identification.
• Configurable frequency of data updates (from 1 hour up to 24 hours) to balance data freshness and system load.
• Integration with external marketplace APIs for accurate and timely price and BuyBox data.
• Secure storage of product data, including current and historical prices, with capacity to scale to thousands of items.
• User interface or dashboard for selecting products, viewing real-time data, and configuring update intervals.

• Marketplace API (e.g., Amazon or other relevant platform's API) for accessing pricing and BuyBox information.
• External data store or spreadsheet API for managing product ASINs and associated data updates.

• System must handle the tracking of at least 500 products with the ability to scale to increased volume as needed.
• Data refresh cycles configurable from 1 to 24 hours without impacting system performance.
• Ensure low latency for data retrieval and updates to support real-time decision making.
• Secure handling of API credentials and sensitive data, compliant with best security practices.

The implementation of this system aims to significantly optimize the client's pricing strategy by providing real-time, accurate marketplace data. Anticipated outcomes include reduced manual monitoring efforts, improved price competitiveness, and an estimated 10% increase in sales due to better-informed pricing decisions and enhanced market responsiveness.