Operating across North America and Europe, this online printing company specializes in customizable print products for businesses and individual consumers. They aim to make printing easy, affordable, and high-quality — offering great materials, good prices, and strong customer service. Their consumer base involves Independent authors (e.g., self-publishing books), creative professionals (e.g., designers, artists, photographers), as well as large enterprises (companies that need bulk or branded print materials).
To sustain their competitive pricing model, the client needed a robust, continuous system capable of capturing and comparing pricing, specifications, and delivery terms from their top ten global competitors. The existing manual research process was slow, error-prone, and couldn't keep pace with daily market fluctuations.
The scope of work involved:
Our goal was to give the client clean, structured, and comparable pricing data from all ten competitors so they could spot where their prices were too high or too low, identify gaps in service levels compared to competitors (like slower delivery or missing options), and adjust their pricing or offerings to stay competitive. To achieve this, we had to scrape web data, validate and standardize it, and deliver it in the client’s preferred formats.
Developing a framework to gather dynamic, high-volume competitor data presented immediate technical and logistical hurdles:
Many competitor websites leveraged JavaScript-heavy single-page applications (SPAs) and multi-step product configurators. These sites don’t show all data in the initial HTML — the prices load dynamically after user interaction (e.g., selecting options, choosing sizes, or customizing products). This made standard web scraping methods ineffective because they couldn’t easily access or simulate those interactions.
Competitors displayed product specifications and prices using divergent terminology, making meaningful comparison impossible without extensive data standardization.
The client required assurance that the competitive pricing data would be refreshed automatically and delivered monthly, eliminating the risk of using obsolete information.
Given that the data directly informed multi-million-dollar pricing decisions, there was zero tolerance for errors, requiring a fault-tolerant data validation system.
To achieve the objective of benchmarking 1500+ product variations across top competitor platforms with unparalleled speed and accuracy, we engineered a custom, automated competitive intelligence pipeline.
The modular design allows the client to effortlessly expand benchmarking efforts to include new product lines, additional competitor URLs, or different geographic markets without necessitating a major system overhaul.
This automated pricing and competitor-benchmarking pipeline drove significant impact for the global online printing solutions provider:
Captured and validated over 1,500 product configurations across 10 competitors monthly.
Fully automated data collection solution engineered with scalable capabilities.
Our solutions directly supported price adjustments, service-level enhancements, and refined market positioning.
Manual research effort slashed by 90%, shifting internal teams to hands-off, scheduled intelligence.
"This solution has completely transformed our approach to competitor benchmarking. The monthly updates are fast and accurate, and require no extra work on our part. It’s given us the clarity to make smarter, faster pricing decisions."
-VP, Marketing & Business Insights, Client Company
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Partner with SunTec Data for unparalleled precision in competitive intelligence. Leverage our expert data collection and advanced web scraping services to acquire and process critical data. We offer custom data extraction, data management, and market research support for any specialized business intelligence need.
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