Flik is a swipe-happy “Pinterest for shopping” where Gen Z users discover outfits tailored to their mood, weather, and budget. The experience lives or dies on ultra-fresh product data, yet building an in-house scraper would have tied up their engineers and risked constant breakages.
Instead, Flik used Scrapingdog’s Google Shopping & Product API. Within a single sprint, they swapped scripts for an always-on pipeline that fetches thousands of SKUs in near-real-time, with accuracy.
Now their engineers focus on features, not fire drills, and users always see what’s trending right now.
Challenges That the Flik Team Had
Flik’s entire user experience is built on real-time product information, including prices, availability, images, and even size variants, all updated in real-time as shoppers swipe. But stitching that data together in-house meant:
- Constant cat-and-mouse with Google. Rotating proxies, handling CAPTCHAs, and updating selectors every UI tweak would swallow sprint after sprint.
- Costly engineering drag. One full-time engineer keeping scrapers alive is one fewer shipping feature Gen Z notices.
- Breakage risk at launch scale. A single DOM change could yank thousands of SKUs offline, tanking trust and conversion in minutes.
- Global pricing nuances. Flik’s “outfits for any weather” promise requires postal-code-level accuracy, which is hard to replicate reliably without a mature scraping stack.
They needed a pipeline that was as fast and flexible as their feed, without turning the product team into a 24/7 scraper and ops crew.
How Flik Landed on the Right Solution
The search for the right product started from their end.
Eventually, they found Scrapingdog with a few others, and the team ran a quick proof-of-concept with each service.
On asking the Flik team, “What stood out about Scrapingdog’s API when you were evaluating different options?”
The Impact on Flik’s Business after Integrating Scrapingdog’s API
Once Flik integrated Scrapingdog’s Google Shopping & Product API, the difference was immediate.
The Flik team told us:
With real-time and accurate data feeding into their platform, Flik’s product catalog now stays fresh and reliable, giving users up-to-date product information while freeing the engineering team from backend maintenance.
