Apify · European Commission
EU Shop Watcher: catching fake discounts across Europe
Together with Apify and Keboola, we built a tool for the European Commission that uses web scraping and AI to spot fake discounts online — especially during big sales like Black Friday.
Challenge
The European Commission needed to monitor how online shops comply with a new EU consumer protection directive on discounts — across 11 EU member states and 2 EEA countries, far more than manual spot checks can cover.
Solution
Since 2018 we have been running Hlídač shopů (Shop Watcher) with Apify and Keboola, telling real discounts from fake ones in Czech e-shops. Building on it, we designed scrapers and a processing pipeline on the Apify platform that track the price history of 16,000 products on 176 websites.
The project was the first use of our AI tool for generic price extraction, so the scrapers did not need to be hand-tuned for every shop.
How it detects a fake discount
The chart compares the base price (blue) with the discounted prices (red). A base price that drops and then rises again without reason suggests that the advertised discount is not genuine, which may breach EU consumer protection law.
Result
The tool found non-compliant discounts in 43% of the monitored stores. Authorities now get a continuous, structured view of pricing practices — evidence they can act on instead of manual spot checks.
The results of this sweep clearly show, on the one hand, that many traders in Europe still display misleading discounts and need to align with the new requirements of EU consumer protection law as soon as possible. On the other hand, this sweep proves that advanced IT tools leveraging AI can be the key in detecting infringements of consumer protection legislation on a large scale.
I'm proud of our small team that has managed to deliver a tool in a short time that builds on our years of experience in developing and running Hlídač shopů (Shop Watcher). At first, we reused just the chart, but in the background, we had our tools for data quality monitoring, our experience on how to do effective scraping at scale, and our platform for creating and running serverless solutions.
More details in the original post on the Apify Blog.