About Dandan.me
Dandan.me set out to become the most comprehensive price comparison platform in the Middle East and Africa, targeting more than 10 million products across 50,000 brands and 300 vendors. Founded by Dani Ariss, the platform lets shoppers compare prices across vendors in one place, then redirect them to whichever seller offered the best deal. Unlike mature eCommerce markets, the region had no standard affiliate infrastructure to pull vendor data from automatically, which made data acquisition the central problem the platform had to solve.
Challenge
A price comparison site is only as useful as the vendor data behind it, and in the Middle East that data was genuinely hard to get. Building the catalog created several problems:
A market with no affiliate data pipes:
In established markets, comparison sites lean on affiliate networks and vendor feeds. Dani Ariss was direct that affiliate marketing channels were not common practice in the region, which made obtaining quality vendor data a real obstacle rather than a solved problem.
Competing against dominant scale:
One vendor controlled the market with more than 25 times the product count of its nearest competitor, and Amazon had just entered the region through its acquisition of Souq, raising the bar for any serious competitor.
Manual collection could not reach the target:
Building toward 10 million products by visiting vendor sites by hand, across a fast-moving market with no data infrastructure, was never realistic.
Quality and timeliness, not just volume:
A comparison platform that shows stale prices or mismatched SKUs loses the one thing it exists to offer, which is trust in the number on the screen.
With no affiliate feed to lean on, collecting pricing and product data directly from hundreds of vendors, and keeping it current, was the difference between a catalog that could compete at scale and one that could not.
Why PromptCloud
Solving the data gap directly is where PromptCloud came in. The engagement was built around four needs:
Direct vendor-site acquisition:
Pulling product and pricing data straight from vendor sites, without relying on affiliate programs that did not exist regionally.
Scale toward the catalog target:
Structured collection across 300-plus vendors, built toward a catalog aiming at 10 million products and 50,000 brands.
Quality and timeliness:
Current pricing and clean, structured product data are the priorities Dandan.me named as most important in a data partner.
Maintenance absorbed:
When a vendor site changed its layout, handling that change fell to PromptCloud rather than becoming a gap in the catalog.
PromptCloud’s managed web scraping pipeline acquired eCommerce product and pricing data directly from vendor sites, at the scale and pace the catalog required, without the affiliate infrastructure the region lacked. That removed the data acquisition bottleneck and freed founder attention for building the market itself.
Implementation
Where PromptCloud sat in the pipeline
PromptCloud handled the data acquisition layer beneath the Dandan.me catalog:
Direct vendor-site acquisition:
PromptCloud collected product and pricing data directly from hundreds of vendor sites, sources a regional comparison platform could not reach through affiliate feeds.
Structured delivery on a schedule:
Data arrived as clean, structured product records and current pricing, on the cadence a live shopping experience required.
Freed founder focus:
With acquisition handled, the team could concentrate on educating a market new to price comparison and on building vendor relationships, rather than on scraping infrastructure.
Affiliate marketing channels are not common practice in our region, thus the difficulty in obtaining the required quality data to build our database. With PromptCloud, it became evident that a focus on quality and timeliness was paramount. They have helped us grow our business without compromises.
Dani Ariss
Managing Director & Founder, Dandan.me
Results
With data acquisition solved directly, Dandan.me could attempt what a manual or affiliate-dependent approach could not support:
A catalog target at real scale:
A launch target of 10 million products across 50,000 brands and 300 vendors, unreachable through manual or affiliate-dependent collection alone.
Comprehensiveness as a competitive angle:
The ability to compete on breadth against a dominant regional vendor with 25 times the product count of its nearest rival.
Ready for the demand shift:
A credible platform positioned to meet rising consumer trust in online shopping after Amazon’s entry through Souq.
Consistent, current data:
Structured pricing and SKU data on a schedule, instead of the gaps affiliate-less manual collection would have produced.
Founder time where it mattered:
Attention spent on market education and vendor relationships rather than on building and maintaining scraping infrastructure in-house.
Get Started
Tired of scrapers that break every time a vendor site updates its layout?
Get clean, structured web data delivered on your cadence from a managed pipeline built around your specific sources and schema.
• No contracts. • No credit card required. • No scrapers to babysit.
