AI Automation

Petshack.au

Automated pet supply price discovery across Australia

An independent Australian price comparison engine aggregating real-time catalog data from 40+ pet retailers—free access with no hidden fees or signup friction.

View Petshack.au

40+

Aussie retailers aggregated

Engagement-reported

100%

Free platform access

Design control

1,000s

Pet products compared

Engagement-reported

Zero

Hidden fees or friction

Design control

Numeric figures are engagement-reported from published project work. Baselines and measurement windows are shared with qualified buyers under NDA.

Business challenge

Pet parents across Australia face significant price variance across online stores, specialty stockists, and veterinary suppliers. Finding the best prices on food, prescription diets, and healthcare products traditionally requires tedious multi-tab browsing and manual cross-checking.

Why AI

Manual comparison cannot keep pace with volatile retail catalogs. Automated crawling, normalization, and search indexing is the right approach when the product promise is real-time market transparency at national scale.

Business outcomes

Aussie pet owners save time and money with market-wide comparisons instantly. Retailers gain demand routed directly to their storefronts without subscription paywalls on savings.

Delivery approach

How the solution was implemented.

Crawlers run on schedules to refresh catalogs; search presents ranked deals from cheapest to highest; checkout stays on the merchant site—transparency without owning the transaction.

Solution architecture

Distributed web crawling pipelines for periodic price and stock extraction
Fast search indexing (ElasticSearch/Algolia) with query auto-complete
Relational database for multi-store SKU normalization and price tracking
High-speed frontend for low-latency rendering on mobile and desktop
Affiliate and direct link tracking for seamless merchant redirection

AI capabilities delivered

Automated catalog ingestion and normalization
Real-time price matrix ranking across retailers
Brand and category filtering at search scale
Deals and promo surfacing alongside baseline prices

Outcome detail

Smarter pet parenting through instant multi-retailer price visibility
Transparent, free comparison without hidden affiliate markups
Higher retailer visibility connecting consumer demand to local and national stores

Technical highlights

What made the delivery work.

40+ Australian retailers in a single search

Direct merchant routing without checkout middleware

Deals and promo hub alongside live price matrices

No signup required for core comparison features

Enterprise technologies used

Python web scraperElasticSearch / AlgoliaNode.js / ExpressModern frontendCloud DBAutomated schedulers

Lessons learned

Comparison products win on crawl reliability and search speed—not feature breadth.
Direct merchant routing preserves trust versus opaque affiliate layers.
Normalized SKU data is the moat across fragmented retail catalogs.

Discuss a similar AI initiative.

Thirty minutes with an architect to pressure-test fit, constraints, and a practical first slice, NDA available for qualified opportunities.