In the years 2009-2012, Frank Pietersen, owner of Level 8, had a small webshop. After he had successfully sold this webshop and was busy establishing his company in web applications, he kept in touch with 1 of the manufacturers who supplied him at the time.
In 2018, this supplier asked whether he could help with automatically checking the prices that the resellers were using. This was because it turned out that the resellers were often selling below the recommended retail prices and therefore put margins under pressure. As a result, new resellers were not inclined to sell the manufacturer's products. The manufacturer, whom for privacy reasons we will not mention by name, was busy for at least 1 day every week to check the sites of the resellers. This had to and could be improved.
It soon became apparent that improvement was possible. Instead of spending a day every week on checking and therefore being able to only check a small part, he had a list every day without any time commitment with which he could take the desired actions.
After 1.5 years of checking prices using simple scripts, the system was further expanded and marketed under the name "PricingControl". We are currently reviewing thousands of URLs every day to analyze and store prices.