Retail availability monitoring and notification platform
Scalable polling and crawling infrastructure delivering timely alerts with operational oversight and analytics.
Context
Retail customers frequently miss product restocks due to limited notification tooling across online stores. The objective was to build a lightweight platform allowing users to track specific items and receive alerts when stock becomes available. The platform needed to operate reliably at scale — across thousands of monitored products.
The challenge
- Monitoring large numbers of product pages
- Handling stores without formal APIs
- Polling stock changes at controlled intervals
- Scaling scheduled checks across thousands of active alerts
- Delivering email notifications reliably
- Tracking engagement via click analytics
- Handling firewalls and request restrictions without aggressive scraping behaviour
Our role
GreyTwo designed and built the platform end-to-end. This included backend service architecture, a scheduled polling system using optimised cron orchestration, controlled crawling logic with rate control and firewall-aware handling, an email notification system, user tracking and click analytics, internal reporting, and a management dashboard for operational oversight. The system was engineered for stability and controlled scaling.
Key areas of delivery
Scalable monitoring architecture
Polling infrastructure designed to check thousands of product pages every few hours. Checks were distributed and optimised to minimise load, avoid triggering store protections, and reduce redundant requests.
Crawling and firewall handling
Controlled request pacing, retry management, error detection and firewall response handling to maintain stable operation across stores without APIs.
Alerts and notifications
Email notifications designed to avoid duplicates, scale with active alerts, and track user engagement via click tracking.
Internal reporting and management
Dashboard tooling providing visibility into active alerts, crawling behaviour, and user engagement metrics.
Impact
- Scaled monitoring across thousands of active alerts
- Maintained reliable polling without infrastructure instability
- Reduced risk of store blocking through controlled crawling
- Enabled operational oversight through structured reporting
- Delivered a lean, production-ready notification platform