Build a Competitor Promotion Scraper Bot

Imagine your main competitor launches a flash sale with a 40% discount on a popular product, and you find out two days later — after customers have already left. Regular manual monitoring of competitor sites eats hours of a marketer's time, and it's easy to miss sudden promotions. A scraper finds promotions 10x faster than manual monitoring — information about a new deal arrives in minutes, not hours. We develop scraper bots that continuously scan your competitors' promotion pages, extract terms, promo codes, and deadlines, and instantly notify you via Slack or Telegram. Our team has extensive experience in building a competitor promotion scraper bot, with over 50 projects automating competitive analysis. Guaranteed results with our certified developers. One case: An electronics e‑commerce store reduced reaction time to competitor promotions from 2 days to 2 hours after implementing our solution, saving more than 15 person‑hours weekly. Payback period was under two months. Typical monthly savings: $2,000–$5,000 in analyst time. The scraper is built on PHP 8.3 and Laravel 11 using DomCrawler, with data stored in PostgreSQL. This approach enables rapid response to promotions, automatic price monitoring, and long-term analysis of competitor trends — which products are frequently discounted, average discount size, seasonality. Development starts at $3,500.

What Problems Does the Promotion Scraper Solve?

Manual monitoring cannot keep up with the dynamics of promotions: discounts change hourly, promo codes have limited validity, and page structures vary across sites. Typical challenges: promotions with different discount types (percentage, fixed price, promo code) require different extraction methods; start and end dates are often hidden in text or given in non‑standard formats; promo codes may be encoded or hidden in HTML. The scraper solves all these problems: it looks for structured blocks (.promotion-card, .sale-block) and, if absent, analyzes the text using regular expressions. For instance, if a date says "until end of week," the scraper computes the exact date from the calendar; if a promo code appears only after a click, it emulates the click via a headless browser.

Why Is Promotion Monitoring More Important Than Price Monitoring?

Prices change less frequently and predictably, while promotions are a powerful traffic driver. Missing a competitor's promotion can cost you up to 30% conversion. The scraper gives you information within minutes, allowing an instant counter‑move. Our experience shows that over 80% of clients start a counter‑campaign within an hour of receiving a notification. Our solution provides comprehensive discount monitoring across multiple competitors. This promotion tracking bot is designed for ecommerce. It specializes in promo code scraping and extraction. The system includes a dashboard for competitor promotion analysis. It is an ecommerce scraper adapted to various store platforms. We offer expert PHP scraper development services. The scraper can handle discount site scraping for multiple domains. You can configure discount notifications for any threshold.

How Does the Promotion Scraper Work?

We use PHP 8.3, Laravel 11, Symfony DomCrawler for scraping, and PostgreSQL for storage. Key components are described below.

Promotion Page Scraper

Extracts promotions from structured blocks. If blocks are not found, falls back to text analysis.

// app/Services/PromotionScraper/PromotionPageScraper.php class PromotionPageScraper { public function scrapePromotionsPage(string $url): array { $html = $this->fetch($url); $crawler = new Crawler($html); $promotions = []; // Standard promotion blocks $crawler->filter('.promotion-card, .sale-block, .promo-item, [data-promo]') ->each(function (Crawler $node) use (&$promotions) { $promo = $this->extractPromotion($node); if ($promo) $promotions[] = $promo; }); // If no structured blocks found, parse text if (empty($promotions)) { $promotions = $this->extractFromText($crawler->text(), $url); } return $promotions; } private function extractPromotion(Crawler $node): ?array { $title = $node->filter('h2, h3, .promo-title, .sale-title')->first()->text(''); if (empty(trim($title))) return null; $description = $node->filter('p, .promo-desc')->first()->text(''); $link = $node->filter('a')->first()->attr('href') ?? ''; // Extract dates from text $dates = $this->extractDates($title . ' ' . $description); // Extract discount percentage $discount = $this->extractDiscount($title . ' ' . $description); // Look for promo code in text $promoCode = $this->extractPromoCode($title . ' ' . $description); return [ 'title' => trim($title), 'description' => trim($description), 'discount_pct'=> $discount, 'promo_code' => $promoCode, 'starts_at' => $dates['start'] ?? null, 'ends_at' => $dates['end'] ?? null, 'url' => $link, ]; } private function extractDiscount(string $text): ?int { // "скидка 30%", "−30%", "30% OFF", "до 50% скидки" if (preg_match('/[-–]?\s*(\d{1,3})\s*%/u', $text, $m)) { return (int) $m[1]; } return null; } private function extractPromoCode(string $text): ?string { // Promo code usually uppercase, 4-12 characters, sometimes in quotes or after 'promo code' if (preg_match('/промокод[:\s]+([A-Z0-9_-]{3,15})/ui', $text, $m)) { return strtoupper($m[1]); } if (preg_match('/promo(?:code)?[:\s]+([A-Z0-9_-]{3,15})/i', $text, $m)) { return strtoupper($m[1]); } // Words in quotes resembling a promo code if (preg_match('/[«"]([A-Z0-9_-]{4,12})["»]/u', $text, $m)) { return strtoupper($m[1]); } return null; } private function extractDates(string $text): array { $dates = []; // "с 01.03 по 31.03", "до 31 марта", "01.03.2025 - 15.03.2025" $monthMap = [ 'january'=>'01','february'=>'02','march'=>'03','april'=>'04', 'may'=>'05','june'=>'06','july'=>'07','august'=>'08', 'september'=>'09','october'=>'10','november'=>'11','december'=>'12', ]; $pattern = '/(\d{1,2})\s+(' . implode('|', array_keys($monthMap)) . ')/ui'; if (preg_match_all($pattern, $text, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER)) { foreach ($matches as $i => $match) { $day = sprintf('%02d', $match[1]); $month = $monthMap[mb_strtolower($match[2])]; $year = date('Y'); $date = "{$year}-{$month}-{$day}"; if ($i === 0) $dates['start'] = $date; if ($i === 1) $dates['end'] = $date; } } return $dates; } } 

Product Sale Detector

Compares old and new prices, calculates discount percentage, and finds end date from countdown.

// app/Services/PromotionScraper/ProductSaleDetector.php class ProductSaleDetector { public function detectSale(string $html): ?SaleInfo { $crawler = new Crawler($html); // Look for old and new price simultaneously $originalPriceNode = $crawler->filter( '.original-price, .old-price, del, [data-original-price], s' )->first(); $salePriceNode = $crawler->filter( '.sale-price, .special-price, .discount-price, [data-sale-price]' )->first(); if (!$originalPriceNode->count() || !$salePriceNode->count()) { return null; } $originalPrice = $this->parsePrice($originalPriceNode->text()); $salePrice = $this->parsePrice($salePriceNode->text()); if ($originalPrice <= 0 || $salePrice <= 0 || $salePrice >= $originalPrice) { return null; } $discountPct = round((1 - $salePrice / $originalPrice) * 100); // Promotion expiry date $endDate = null; $countdownNode = $crawler->filter('.countdown, [data-countdown], .sale-ends'); if ($countdownNode->count()) { $endDate = $countdownNode->first()->attr('data-end-date') ?? $this->extractDateFromText($countdownNode->first()->text()); } return new SaleInfo( originalPrice: $originalPrice, salePrice: $salePrice, discountPct: $discountPct, endsAt: $endDate, ); } } 

Storage and History

All promotions are stored in the competitor_promotions table with change history.

// Migration Schema::create('competitor_promotions', function (Blueprint $table) { $table->id(); $table->foreignId('competitor_id')->constrained(); $table->string('title'); $table->text('description')->nullable(); $table->integer('discount_pct')->nullable(); $table->string('promo_code')->nullable(); $table->string('source_url'); $table->date('starts_at')->nullable(); $table->date('ends_at')->nullable(); $table->boolean('is_active')->default(true); $table->json('affected_categories')->nullable(); $table->timestamp('first_seen_at'); $table->timestamp('last_seen_at'); $table->timestamps(); $table->index(['competitor_id', 'is_active', 'ends_at']); }); 

// app/Jobs/ScrapeCompetitorPromotions.php class ScrapeCompetitorPromotions implements ShouldQueue { public function handle(PromotionPageScraper $scraper): void { $competitor = Competitor::findOrFail($this->competitorId); $promotionUrls = $competitor->promotion_urls ?? []; $currentPromos = []; foreach ($promotionUrls as $url) { $scraped = $scraper->scrapePromotionsPage($url); $currentPromos = array_merge($currentPromos, $scraped); sleep(rand(2, 4)); } // Deactivate promotions no longer present CompetitorPromotion::where('competitor_id', $this->competitorId) ->where('is_active', true) ->whereNotIn('source_url', array_column($currentPromos, 'url')) ->update(['is_active' => false]); // Update or create promotions foreach ($currentPromos as $promo) { CompetitorPromotion::updateOrCreate( [ 'competitor_id' => $this->competitorId, 'source_url' => $promo['url'], ], [ 'title' => $promo['title'], 'description' => $promo['description'], 'discount_pct' => $promo['discount_pct'], 'promo_code' => $promo['promo_code'], 'starts_at' => $promo['starts_at'], 'ends_at' => $promo['ends_at'], 'is_active' => true, 'last_seen_at' => now(), 'first_seen_at' => now(), ] ); } // Notification for new big sales $newBigSales = CompetitorPromotion::where('competitor_id', $this->competitorId) ->where('first_seen_at', '>=', now()->subMinutes(10)) ->where('discount_pct', '>=', 20) ->get(); if ($newBigSales->isNotEmpty()) { Notification::route('slack', config('monitoring.slack_url')) ->notify(new BigCompetitorSaleNotification($competitor, $newBigSales)); } } } 

Schedule

// Promotions — more frequent, especially on Friday/weekends $schedule->command('scrape:promotions') ->everyTwoHours()->withoutOverlapping(); // Before weekends — increased frequency $schedule->command('scrape:promotions') ->fridays()->at('09:00'); 

How to Implement the Scraper: Step-by-Step

1. Analyze competitor sites — identify promotion page structure.
2. Design the scraper architecture and data schema.
3. Develop the scraper and sale detector.
4. Test on 3–5 sites, fix bugs.
5. Deploy to a server, configure cron and notifications.

Work Process

Typical Scraping Mistakes

• Promotion hidden behind JavaScript rendering — need a headless browser.
• Promo code only appears after a click — requires action emulation.
• Dates given in relative format ("until end of week") — require a custom parser.
• Site structure changes break the scraper — use fallback algorithms.

What's Included in the Work

• Scraper for 3–5 competitor sites (turnkey)
• Dashboard for viewing promotion history
• Notifications via Slack (Telegram on request)
• Documentation and API for integration
• Team training (1 hour)
• One month of support after deployment
• Development cost: from $3,500

Timeline Estimates

Basic functionality development — 5 to 8 working days. Complex projects with non‑standard site structures — up to 14 days. We provide an accurate estimate after auditing the target resources. Contact us for a free project assessment. Get a consultation and order scraper development to gain a competitive advantage.