ShopGrok goes from summary data to full product intelligence at scale

About ShopGrok

ShopGrok is an Australian startup providing consumer insights and data analytics services to the retail and consumer goods sector. Their platform helps category managers at retailers optimize pricing, product range, and promotional activity, delivering real-time competitive intelligence that enables better, more data-driven decisions.

ShopGrok currently serves at least a quarter of Australia’s top 20 retailers, as well as large global marketplaces seeking to optimize their inventories and pricing. Founded by Aaron Cowper, former Head of Price Strategy at Woolworths and McKinsey consultant, the company’s core competency is in price strategy, analytics, and data engineering.

The challenge

A typical retailer carries between 20,000 and 100,000 products. Pricing decisions directly affect customer loyalty and sales margin, and competitors like Amazon change prices up to 10 to 20 times a day – falling behind means falling out of the consideration set entirely.

Over almost four years in business, ShopGrok watched public web access become progressively harder. Retail sites deployed increasingly sophisticated access barriers, pricing became postcode-dependent and geo-located by region, and the engineering effort required to keep up was pulling the team’s focus away from what their customers actually paid for: matching data, building models, and generating actionable insights.

Why Bright Data

As public web access became harder to maintain, ShopGrok needed a partner that could handle the infrastructure complexity so the team could stay focused on insights. The requirement was clear: a tiered, cost-effective solution that could handle everything from straightforward datacenter access to complex geo-located requests, without requiring ShopGrok to build and monitor it themselves.

Three capabilities made Bright Data the right fit:

• Tiered product flexibility – The ability to use Datacenter IPs for simpler sites and Web Unlocker for more complex ones means ShopGrok can optimize cost and performance across every retailer they monitor, scaling up or down as needed
• Geo-located access – Bright Data’s network enables micro-geographic targeting by region and postcode, allowing ShopGrok to capture location-based pricing that accurately reflects what consumers in specific areas actually see
• Coverage & cost – broad global coverage, plus enterprise pricing that cut unit cost and removed billing-related outages

“Bright Data has saved a lot of time, effort, and manpower building our web data collection set-up and monitoring systems – we can rely on Bright Data to do most of that for us.”

Aaron Cowper, Founder and CEO, ShopGrok

The Results

ShopGrok started using Bright Data about a year and a half ago, initially just for network access, before gradually adding additional products. They now use Datacenter Proxies, Residential Proxies, and Web Unlocker, selecting the right tier for each website based on complexity and cost.

With Bright Data powering their data collection infrastructure, ShopGrok significantly expanded both the volume and depth of data they capture. Where they previously collected only summary data, they now capture full product details, including ingredients, specifications, country of origin, nutritional information, current prices, historical “was” prices, “now” prices, and promotional pricing, delivering far richer insights to clients.

The efficiency of access also unlocked geo-located pricing by postcode and state, real-time monitoring of dynamic pricing across global marketplaces, and a richer competitive intelligence layer that helps retailers stay in the consideration set for every product they sell.

Looking Ahead

With Bright Data as the foundation of their data collection infrastructure, ShopGrok is actively exploring additional products, including the Proxy Manager and Web Unlocker API, as they prepare to enter new international markets and expand the depth of their retail intelligence platform.