E-Commerce Product Data Acquisition (Multi-Merchant)

**Overview** We are building an AI-powered consumer savings optimization platform that computes the true net effective price of any e-commerce purchase across all available savings levers. A core requirement is pulling structured product data (e.g., price, discounts, availability, identifiers, shipping fee, delivery time, etc.) from a wide variety of US e-commerce merchants in real time. We have developed a data acquisition strategy and are looking to hire an experienced practitioner to stress-test our approach. **What We've Already Done**: - Conducted merchant-by-merchant research across 30+ US retailers covering direct APIs, affiliate feed programs (Rakuten, CJ, Impact, AvantLink), and managed scraping providers - Mapped acquisition routes by merchant including ToS constraints, feed cadence, and identifier availability - Evaluated managed scraping providers (Oxylabs, ZenRows, Bright Data) and Google Shopping APIs (DataForSEO, SearchAPI) - Designed a 4-workload acquisition pipeline and a 15-merchant test plan covering field extraction, ZIP/location sensitivity, reliability over 48 hours, and end-to-end cold acquisition latency **Our Current Approach**: - Direct API / affiliate feed baseline: seed catalog with stable identifiers and baseline price where terms allow - Google Shopping discovery: find merchant candidates and prices before paying for merchant-page checks (DataForSEO, SearchAPI) - Merchant-page scraping: extract total price including shipping and tax for finalists (Oxylabs, ZenRows, Bright Data) - Final recheck: confirm payable offer on top-ranked options before user commits **Ideal Background** - Production experience extracting structured product data from 10+ diverse US e-commerce merchants simultaneously - Hands-on experience with the full acquisition stack: direct APIs, affiliate feeds, and managed scraping providers in production - Specific experience with data normalization across heterogeneous merchant pages - Opinions formed by production failures, not theory **Process** Shortlisted candidates will be invited to a 30-45 minute consultation. This will serve as both a working session and a mutual evaluation. We will share any materials that you will need to prepare 24 hours in advance. Following the consultation, we will select one candidate for a paid engagement. Scope and timeline will be agreed at that time.