Takealot South Africa: live SKUs to product picks

Local marketplaces in emerging markets rarely have data services as mature as Amazon's. To size up air purifiers in South Africa, we first needed to know which brands sell on Takealot, at what prices, and how well.

The question: on a platform with no ready-made tool, how do we get the full live list fast and cheaply?

I handled collection and analysis with an off-the-shelf scraper:

• Found the Actor for the platform on Apify and set keywords and parameters
• Exported every live SKU and cleaned the data
• Mapped the landscape by brand and price band and wrote product recommendations

The cleaned data fed price-band product recommendations directly: which bands the leading brands hold, which are crowded and where the openings are, as a basis for the South African product mix.