Grainger Data: 3 MRO Catalogs with UNSPSC, 250K Products from Cromwell
Full MRO catalogs from Grainger, Fastenal and Cromwell for a product content company: UNSPSC, EAN, every attribute and a taxonomy sheet.
Five offers per EAN, read from the Allegro comparison view
A search by EAN on Allegro rarely lists the offers themselves. It usually shows one sponsored and one regular product card, and the competing offers sit behind the button that compares all offers for that product. That comparison view is the list the client cares about. It usually holds no more than five offers; when it holds more, the client wanted them sorted by price and cut at the five cheapest.
Each row was one offer: product title, base price, price with delivery, and delivery date. Two more columns, the searched EAN and the link to the comparison view, let the client open any row on the site and check it. Descriptions and images were left out, as the brief asked.
Rules the client set for the Allegro offers file
The first full files settled three rules:
- Sponsored results are left out; only regular offers count.
- A product with a single offer and no comparison button still goes into the file.
- CSV uses a semicolon as the delimiter, because product titles often contain commas; an XLSX copy is available for the same data.
The client confirmed the semicolon files looked good and kept CSV as its format.
Six days from go-ahead to a daily file
Within six days of the request the client had a sample of 100 entries built from a batch of its own EANs, in the final layout, and then gave the go-ahead. It opened an SFTP server with an input folder and an output folder, and asked for dated file names: a list named input-YYYY-MM-DD.csv came back as output-YYYY-MM-DD.csv.
The first full list arrived one morning, and the output file was on the SFTP that evening, six days after the go-ahead. Within a week the exchange ran on a fixed clock: the client put the day's list in the input folder at noon its time, and the results were in the output folder by noon the next day, weekends included.
Usage the client could see for itself
The client's plan had a limit on rows returned, so it asked to follow its usage during the month and adjust its lists to it. We built a dashboard that only the client's login could open. It showed how many EANs came in and how many rows went out each day, with totals for any chosen period.
What the client had
For more than seven months, the client received a daily file of up to five of the cheapest Allegro offers for each EAN on its list, up to about 35,000 rows a day. Every row showed what a buyer would pay with delivery and when the item would arrive, next to the base price, so the client could set its own price against the five cheapest offers for the same product.
See our Allegro scraper and our eCommerce data scraping service; data can also come through our API or as a JSON feed. To check your own product list against a marketplace, contact our team.
