Case Study: European Commission detects fake discounts across Europe with Apify

European Commission flags 43% of monitored stores for fake discounts with Apify

The European Commission faced the challenge of monitoring compliance with the EU Price Indication Directive across thousands of online retailers. They needed to track price histories for 16,000 products on 176 websites to identify fake discounts during sales events. To tackle this, they partnered with vendor Apify to utilize its web scraping and AI platform.

Apify implemented a solution using its AI-powered web scraping tools to automatically collect prices and take screenshots of product pages. This system monitored prices during Black Friday and for the 30 days prior, automatically flagging discounts that breached the directive. The results were significant, with the tool finding that 43% of monitored stores offered non-compliant discounts, providing crucial evidence for national authorities to issue warnings and millions of euros in fines.

European Commission