We started building Crawlbot to answer a simple question: what does the digital shelf actually look like for consumer electronics brands, and how fast does it change? Twelve months and several hundred thousand scrapes later, we have an answer. It changes constantly, it varies wildly between retailers, and almost nobody is measuring it properly.
This post shares the real numbers from our production system — not projections or estimates, but actual data from the scrapers that run every day across the UK and South Africa. Some of it confirmed what we expected. Some of it surprised us.
Every day, Crawlbot scrapes 8,197 product detail pages across 13 retailers, extracting 62 data points from each one. That is over half a million data points collected every 24 hours, covering everything from pricing and promotional status to A+ content, video, review scores, and parsed hardware specifications like CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, and screen size.
The breakdown by retailer tells its own story about where the product density is:
But product detail pages are only half the picture. On the share of voice side, we scrape category pages across 22 retailers every hour, tracking which products appear, in which position, and whether each placement is organic or sponsored. That generates 521,507 product appearances per week and over 41.7 million product appearances across 382 days of continuous monitoring.
Content inspection tells you what your product page looks like. Share of voice tells you whether anyone can find it. You need both.
One of the first things that jumped out of our data is how dramatically content quality varies between retailers — even for the exact same product from the exact same brand.
Take A+ content (the enhanced brand content with rich media, lifestyle imagery, and detailed feature callouts that manufacturers syndicate to retailers). You would expect this to be fairly consistent. After all, the brand creates the content once and distributes it to every retail partner. In practice, it is anything but consistent:
The same pattern repeats for video content. Makro has zero video across its entire catalog. Box, despite having 97% A+ coverage, only has video on 3.4% of its products. Very, by contrast, delivers both A+ and video at 99% and 31% respectively — a significantly richer product experience.
Why does this matter? Because content quality directly impacts conversion rates. A shopper comparing the same HP laptop on Very versus AO sees a completely different product experience. One has rich media, lifestyle imagery, and detailed feature breakdowns. The other has a spec list and a handful of photos. The product is identical. The likelihood of purchase is not.
For brands, this is an actionable gap. If your A+ content is missing from a retailer where your competitor has it, you are losing conversions — not because your product is worse, but because your product page is worse.
We track sponsored versus organic placement status on every category page we scrape. The first surprise: most retailers do not have sponsored products at all. Only 6 of the 22 retailers we monitor serve sponsored placements in their category page results.
Among those that do, the concentration varies considerably:
These numbers look modest as percentages, but they translate to significant visibility displacement. On a Currys laptop category page showing 48 products, 7.1% sponsored means 3 to 4 positions are paid placements. Those are positions that an organically strong product would otherwise occupy. If your competitor is bidding on those slots and you are not, they are appearing above you regardless of your organic performance.
The brand-level data is even more revealing. Apple has a sponsored rate of just 0.04% — essentially zero. Apple relies almost entirely on organic visibility and brand strength. Lenovo, by contrast, is the most active spender at 4.8% of all its appearances being sponsored. This reflects fundamentally different go-to-market strategies: Apple lets product demand do the work; Lenovo actively buys shelf placement to compensate for having a wider portfolio competing for attention.
If you are a brand deciding where to allocate retail media budget, this context matters enormously. The sponsored landscape is not uniform. The retailers where sponsored placements exist are the ones where paid strategy has the highest leverage — and where ignoring retail media is most costly.
Since February 21, we have tracked 4,529 price changes across 12 retailers. That is roughly 300 price changes per day in consumer electronics alone.
This number was higher than we anticipated. It means that on any given day, several hundred products across our tracked universe are changing price — sometimes by a few pounds, sometimes by 20% or more. Promotional events like flash sales, price-matching adjustments, and stock-clearing markdowns happen continuously, not just during planned sale events.
If you check competitor prices weekly, you are missing approximately 80% of the price changes that happen between checks.
For brands, the implication is clear: weekly or monthly price monitoring is not enough to understand what is happening in the market. Daily monitoring catches the trend. But the granularity of 300+ changes per day means that even daily snapshots undercount intraday volatility — a product might drop in price at 10 AM and revert by 6 PM, and a once-daily check at 8 AM would miss the entire event.
We now record every price change with a timestamp, the old price, the new price, and the promotional status before and after. This gives brands a complete history of competitor pricing behaviour — not just what the price is today, but how it got there.
When we started expanding into South African retailers, we expected to find existing tools already covering the market. We could not find a single platform that tracks product-level data on Game, Incredible Connection, Computermania, HiFi Corp, or Makro. These retailers collectively represent a significant share of the South African consumer electronics market, and as far as we can tell, nobody is systematically monitoring them.
The competitive landscape in South Africa looks markedly different from the UK. A few patterns stand out:
ASUS dominates. ASUS holds the number one or number two share of voice position on 5 of the 7 South African retailers we track. Their category page presence across Game, Incredible, Computermania, HiFi Corp, and Makro is consistently strong. In the UK, ASUS competes for third or fourth place behind HP and Lenovo. In South Africa, they own the shelf.
Xiaomi is a force that does not exist in the UK. On Incredible Connection and HiFi Corp, Xiaomi ranks in the top 3 brands by share of voice. In the UK, Xiaomi has negligible presence in the consumer electronics category pages we monitor. This is not a global brand underperforming — it is a brand with a deliberately different regional strategy. Without local data, you would never see it.
PCBuilder punches above its weight. On Computermania, PCBuilder holds a significant share of visible product positions — a brand that barely registers on other retailers. This kind of retailer-specific dominance is only visible when you measure at the individual store level.
For international brands managing both UK and South African channels, the lesson is that you cannot assume UK patterns apply to South Africa. The competitive set is different, the dominant brands are different, and the strategies that win shelf space are different. You need local measurement.
If there is a single thread connecting everything in this post, it is this: the digital shelf is not static, it is not consistent, and it is not optional to monitor.
Your product page on AO might have zero A+ content while the same product on Very has rich media and video. Your competitors might be changing prices 300 times a day while you check weekly. A brand you have never heard of might be dominating the category page on a retailer you have not looked at yet. And the sponsored landscape favours brands that actively invest — while some, like Apple, can afford to ignore it entirely because their organic fundamentals are unassailable.
The combination of hourly share of voice monitoring, daily content inspection, and continuous price tracking gives brands the full picture they need to make informed decisions about retail media spend, content investment, and competitive positioning. Each data stream is useful on its own. Together, they tell you not just what is happening, but why — and what to do about it.
We built Crawlbot because we believe every brand competing on the digital shelf deserves access to this level of visibility. Not quarterly reports. Not sampled data. Not anonymised competitors. Real numbers, updated every hour, across every retailer that matters.
Get a free report showing your share of voice, content quality gaps, and price positioning across the retailers that matter to your brand — UK and South Africa.
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