Real-Time Retail Pricing Data Analyst — Competitive Intelligence for French Food Retail

Problem

A major French food retailer needed to stay competitive in a fast-moving market where pricing strategies directly impact margins and customer loyalty.

The manual process of tracking competitor prices across multiple chains and thousands of SKUs consumed over 40 hours per week and often resulted in outdated insights by the time decisions were made.

Approach

Designed and deployed a fully automated web scraping system targeting major French food retail competitors (Carrefour, Leclerc, Auchan, etc.).

Built a Python-based data processing pipeline that normalizes, deduplicates, and enriches pricing data, matching products across different retailer catalogs.

Created an interactive dashboard with real-time visualizations, price trend analysis, and automated alerts for significant competitor price changes.

Impact

Enabled data-driven pricing decisions that recovered €50K+ monthly through competitive positioning and margin optimization.

Reduced manual market research time from 40+ hours to near-zero, freeing the pricing team to focus on strategic analysis rather than data collection.

Provided real-time competitive intelligence with 4-hour refresh cycles, enabling rapid response to market changes and promotional activities.