Shopilot E-Commerce Intelligence Platform
Multi-source scraping system for AI-powered price comparison across 50+ retailers. Architected enterprise-grade infrastructure processing 10,000 products/minute with 99.8% accuracy.
January 15, 2023 - December 1, 2024
2 min read
Technologies Used
Python Scrapy Selenium PostgreSQL Pandas AWS EC2 Redis Docker
Overview
Lead Scraping Engineer for Shopilot, a Y Combinator-backed AI price comparison platform. Designed and implemented enterprise-grade scraping infrastructure that processes real-time product data from Amazon, Target, Walmart, Google Shopping, and 50+ other retailers.
The Challenge
The client needed a scalable solution to:
- Extract product data from 50+ major retailers in real-time
- Handle sophisticated anti-bot protections across different platforms
- Process and validate massive amounts of data with high accuracy
- Scale from 500 products/minute to handle exponentially higher volumes
Technical Implementation
Multi-Source Scraping Architecture
Built a distributed scraping system using Python, Scrapy, and Selenium that handles different anti-bot mechanisms across retailers:
- Rotating Residential Proxies: Managed 1000+ IP addresses for request distribution
- Browser Fingerprint Randomization: Evaded fingerprint-based detection
- CAPTCHA Solving Integration: 2Captcha API for automated challenge solving
- Adaptive Rate Limiting: Dynamic throttling based on target response patterns
Data Pipeline
- Real-time data validation layers ensuring 99.8% accuracy
- PostgreSQL for structured storage with optimized indexing
- Redis caching for frequently accessed product data
- Pandas for data transformation and normalization
Infrastructure
- AWS EC2 auto-scaling for handling traffic spikes
- Docker containerization for consistent deployments
- Comprehensive monitoring and alerting system
Results & Impact
- Performance: 95% improvement from 500/min baseline to 10,000 products/minute sustained throughput
- Scale: 2M+ products indexed across 50+ retailers
- Accuracy: 99.8% data accuracy through validation layers
- Business Impact: Enabled startup achieving $200K+ monthly revenue
- Client Success: Y Combinator-backed company with successful product launch
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