Grocery Price Scraping API for Spain and the US

Client Overview

The client is a fast-growing food-tech and meal intelligence platform that relies heavily on grocery pricing, product availability, and promotion data to power its applications. Their platform supports use cases such as:

• Meal planning and recommendations
• Grocery price comparison
• Cost optimization for recipes
• Retail pricing intelligence

Spain was the client's primary operating market, with planned expansion into the United States. To support these goals, they required a reliable and scalable grocery data source.

Initially, the client partnered with a third-party grocery data provider. However, as usage increased, several limitations became clear, pushing the client to explore alternatives.

Business Challenges

The client faced multiple operational and data-related challenges:

Inconsistent Data Quality

• Identical products appeared as different SKUs across retailers
• Missing or incorrect UPC/EAN codes
• Product sizes and units were not standardized

Poor Price Freshness

• Prices were not updated frequently during promotions
• High-velocity items such as milk, bread, and eggs showed outdated prices
• Flash deals were often missed

Limited Retailer Coverage

• Weak coverage of regional and city-level retailers in Spain
• No clear roadmap for US retailers
• Inconsistent store-level availability data

API Stability Issues

• Frequent timeouts
• Missing response fields
• No monitoring or failure visibility

The client needed a production-grade grocery scraping API that could replace their existing provider and support both Spain and the US at scale.

Actowiz Solutions Approach

Actowiz Solutions approached this project as a data product, not just a scraping task.

Phase 1: Requirement Analysis

• Identified priority retailers in Spain and the US
• Defined category-level refresh frequencies
• Reviewed the client's internal product and pricing schema

Phase 2: Data Extraction Strategy

• Built retailer-specific scraping logic
• Supported dynamic content and location-based pricing
• Implemented pagination and store discovery mechanisms

Technical Architecture

Data Extraction Layer

• Dedicated scrapers per retailer
• Support for JavaScript-heavy pages
• City-level and store-level data capture

Anti-Blocking Infrastructure

• Residential and datacenter IP rotation
• Browser fingerprint randomization
• Smart throttling and retry logic

Normalization and Matching Engine

• Brand and product name normalization
• Unit and size standardization
• UPC/EAN-based matching
• Fuzzy logic for title similarity

API Design and Delivery

Actowiz delivered a REST-based Grocery Scraping API with the following endpoints:

• Product search
• Product details
• Price and promotion data
• Availability and stock signals
• Historical price tracking

Delivery Formats

• JSON APIs
• Batch CSV exports
• Snowflake- and S3-compatible data dumps

US Expansion Enablement

After stabilizing Spain operations, Actowiz extended coverage to the US by onboarding major retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Kroger. The system supported:

• State-level pricing differences
• Store-level inventory signals
• Promotion text normalization

Business Impact

• Improved price freshness during promotions
• Higher product match accuracy
• Broader retailer and city coverage
• Stable API performance
• Smooth migration from the previous provider

Conclusion

This project enabled the client to build a reliable grocery intelligence layer across two major markets. By focusing on data quality, scalability, and API stability, Actowiz Solutions delivered a long-term alternative to their existing provider.