Kenya E-commerce Competitor Pricing & Supplier Intelligence Tool

Background: In Kenya's rapidly growing e-commerce landscape, sellers of promotional materials like telescopic banners, teardrop banners, and pull-up banners struggle to maintain profitability due to hyper-fragmented marketplace data. Major platforms such as Jumia, Jiji, Kilimall, and various social-commerce channels display wild variations in pricing. Without unified competitor intelligence, merchants in Nairobi and other major towns face squeezed margins or lost sales opportunities. This project aims to build a smart research, scraping, and price recommendation engine that monitors local digital marketplaces, calculates dynamic average pricing, and matches these insights with a verified database of local suppliers, logistics partners, and after-sales service providers in Kenya. Objectives: 1. Deploy robust, automated Python web crawlers to track competitor pricing for promotional materials across major Kenyan digital marketplaces (Jumia, Jiji, Kilimall) on a daily basis. 2. Compute real-time average, minimum, and maximum market prices, and generate automated floor-price suggestions based on customizable merchant profit margins. 3. Build an active database of verified local suppliers and logistics providers, tracking wholesale pricing, stock availability, and shipping reliability. 4. Set up an automated alerting and link validation system to monitor price fluctuations and ensure all competitor sources remain directly verifiable. Scope of Work: - Web Scraper & Crawler Engine: Python-based data extraction pipeline using Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium to bypass bot protection on target Kenyan platforms. - Pricing Analytics Dashboard: Responsive frontend interface visualizing price distributions, moving averages, and automated lower-bound dynamic pricing suggestions. - Supplier & Logistics Catalog: Structured relational database management (PostgreSQL) for validated wholesale suppliers, including catalog items, delivery turnaround times, and after-sales terms. - Automated Alerts & Link Validation: Continuous cron jobs verifying competitor link integrity and sending notifications on target-breaching pricing drops. Key Deliverables: 1. Web-based Admin and Seller Dashboard developed in React and Tailwind CSS. 2. Secure Backend API (Node.js/Express) connected to a PostgreSQL database. 3. Python Scraping Engine deployed with proxy rotation and scheduled run-times. 4. Real-time Price Margin & Floor Calculation Tool. 5. Production-ready cloud deployment (AWS/Heroku) with active monitoring and automated daily backups.