Ficstar helped Baker & Taylor , a long-established books distributor headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina (US), build a reliable pipeline for competitor pricing data  so their team could keep up with fast-moving price changes across competitors’ websites. Baker & Taylor is best known for distributing books , but their broader distribution footprint has also included digital content and entertainment products .  The goal of this engagement was clear: deliver accurate, co

The hardest part of fixing inaccurate web scraping data isn't the fix itself. The real challenge is identifying which data is inaccurate in the first place.

This case study covers a pricing intelligence project where we at Ficstar, a fully managed web data collection and web scraping services  partner for enterprises, collected electronic component prices across top Distributor, Aggregator and Manufacturer websites to capture the tiered pricing and lead time for each part number. In this project, the client provided a massive input list of 700,000+ electronic parts , and our job was to capture price by quantity (tiered price brea