Introduction – Why Food Price Transparency Matters

Online food delivery has exploded in India and the GCC markets, led by platforms like Zomato, Swiggy, and MagicPin. While consumers benefit from convenience, they often face inconsistent pricing for the same dishes across platforms. Taxes, delivery fees, and discounts differ by platform, time, and location.

Consumers routinely overpay without realizing that the same restaurant meal can cost 10–25 % more on one app than another. A data-driven, real-time comparison tool could fix this opacity—allowing users to make informed, cost-efficient choices.

Actowiz Solutions partnered with a food-tech startup that wanted to build a real-time food price comparison app integrating live data from multiple food-delivery ecosystems. The goal was to aggregate menu data, compare item prices, delivery charges, and discounts, and calculate the final checkout cost per dish across Zomato, Swiggy, and MagicPin.

Client Objective

The client's vision was to build a consumer-facing web + mobile app that would:

• Fetch live menu and price data for every restaurant across Zomato, Swiggy, and MagicPin.

• Compare base prices, discounts, delivery fees, and taxes in real time.

• Display the final payable amount and highlight the cheapest option instantly.

• Offer advanced search, filter, and sort options by cuisine, location, and price.

• Provide APIs for future integrations with wallets and loyalty programs.

They needed Actowiz Solutions to build the full data intelligence layer: continuous data extraction, cleaning, comparison, and delivery through a scalable API.

Challenges in the Food Data Ecosystem

Dynamic and Frequent Price Updates

Menu prices, taxes, and delivery fees fluctuate hourly. Some restaurants modify discounts multiple times per day. Capturing such volatility required near real-time scraping.

Platform Variation

Each app used distinct price models.

• Zomato: base + restaurant discount + delivery fee + platform charge.

• Swiggy: dynamic delivery fee based on distance and traffic.

• MagicPin: merchant-driven discounts and coupon stacking.

Anti-Automation Mechanisms

Food platforms employ CAPTCHA, rate-limits, and request pattern detection.Actowiz's challenge: build compliant crawlers that mimic human behavior without triggering blocks.

Real-Time Data Synchronization

To maintain relevance, price data needs to be updated every 5–10 minutes, while ensuring system stability and low latency.

Complex Tax and Billing Logic

Some platforms show pre-tax prices, others include GST or service charges differently. The system had to normalize data to achieve an apples-to-apples comparison.

Actowiz Solutions' Approach

Actowiz deployed a multi-layered AI data pipeline integrating intelligent crawlers, live caching, and normalization algorithms.

Discovery and Scoping

The data-engineering team audited all three platforms to identify:

• HTML structures, API endpoints, and data patterns.

• Dynamic elements rendered via React or VueJS.

• Pagination, search parameters, and delivery-fee calculations.

Crawler Architecture

Each crawler was customized for a specific platform:

• Playwright-based headless browser to render dynamic pages.

• Proxy rotation and session management to avoid IP blocking.

• Smart schedulers that auto-adjusted crawl frequency during peak meal hours.

AI Data Normalization

An AI model matched identical restaurants and dishes across platforms by handling minor name differences ("Domino's Pizza – Koramangala" vs "Domino's Koramangala").It standardized units and normalized tax logic for precise comparisons.

Data Pipeline

• Crawler extracts raw menu and pricing JSON.

• The normalization engine cleans and maps fields.

• Currency conversion and tax standardization applied.

• The comparison algorithm computes the total checkout price.

• Results pushed to API + dashboard in under 60 seconds.

Data Points Captured

• Restaurant Name: Listed brand or outlet — e.g., Behrouz Biryani
  
  

• Platform: Source platform — Zomato / Swiggy / MagicPin (e.g., Swiggy)
  
  

• Dish Name: Menu item captured — Paneer Biryani
  
  

• Base Price: Price before discounts — ₹299
  
  

• Discount: Ongoing platform offer — 20% OFF
  
  

• Delivery Fee: Dynamic delivery charge — ₹32
  
  

• Tax & Charges: Service fee + GST — ₹18
  
  

• Final Payable: Net bill amount after applying all offers — ₹349
  
  

• Timestamp: Last data update — 2025-10-30 12:10 PM

Sample Data Snapshot

Domino’s Pizza – Veg Paradise Medium

• Zomato: ₹412

• Swiggy: ₹389

• MagicPin: ₹398

• Cheapest Platform: Swiggy
  
  

Biryani Blues – Chicken Biryani

• Zomato: ₹321

• Swiggy: ₹345

• MagicPin: ₹310

• Cheapest Platform: MagicPin
  
  

KFC – Zinger Burger Meal

• Zomato: ₹289

• Swiggy: ₹279

• MagicPin: ₹299

• Cheapest Platform: Swiggy
  
  

Behrouz Biryani – Paneer Biryani

• Zomato: ₹349

• Swiggy: ₹370

• MagicPin: ₹339

• Cheapest Platform: MagicPin

The data shows how users can save anywhere from ₹ 10 to ₹ 40 per order just by switching platforms.

Technology Stack

• Web Scraping:
  Tools – Python, Playwright, Requests HTML

• Database:
  Storage – PostgreSQL, AWS S3

• Normalization:
  Processing – Pandas, NumPy, Custom NLP Matcher

• Automation & Scheduling:
  Frameworks – Apache Airflow, AWS Lambda

• Visualization:
  BI Tools – Tableau & Power BI

• Delivery API:
  Framework – FastAPI with JWT Authentication

Dashboard & User Interface

Actowiz Solutions also designed a data dashboard to visualize price comparison in real time.Features included:

• Side-by-side price cards for Zomato, Swiggy, and MagicPin.

• Filters by cuisine, distance, offer type, or rating.

• "Best Deal" badges highlighting the lowest final billing.

• Historical price charts showing fluctuations for popular dishes.

The dashboard was integrated with mobile and web apps via API, delivering a consistent experience across devices.

Performance Metrics

• Data Refresh Time: Improved from manual (>1 day) to every 10 minutes

• Price Accuracy: Increased from approximately 70% to 97.8% verified

• Restaurant Coverage: Expanded from 800 outlets to over 12,000 restaurants

• API Response Latency: Reduced from more than 4 seconds to under 800 ms

• User Savings: Achieved an average of 18–22% savings per order

AI Enhancements

• Duplicate Detection: Eliminated identical menus listed under multiple IDs.

• NLP Matching: Mapped menu items with different naming patterns (e.g., "Paneer Roll Combo" vs "Combo Paneer Roll").

• Dynamic Scheduler: Increased crawl frequency during lunch/dinner rush.

• Anomaly Detection: Flagged sudden > 25 % price changes for verification.

Key Results & Insights

Data Accuracy

Actowiz's system maintained > 97 % accuracy for all price points with minimal latency.

Pricing Trends

Zomato tended to offer the lowest base price for budget meals, while Swiggy had lower delivery fees on average. MagicPin offered the highest discount coupons on weekends.

Restaurant Insights

High-volume brands like Domino's and KFC maintained near-identical pricing, but premium local restaurants varied by as much as 12–15 % across apps.

User Behavior

Beta testing showed users chose the cheapest platform 70 % of the time when differences exceeded ₹ 20.

Business Impact

• Boosted user trust through pricing transparency.

• Enabled restaurants to align cross-platform pricing.

• Laid the foundation for affiliate and cash-back revenue models.

Compliance and Ethics

Actowiz Solutions adheres strictly to ethical data collection policies:

• Scraping only publicly available menu data.

• Respecting robots.txt and request rate limits.

• Complying with GDPR and India's Data Protection Bill standards.

• Providing transparent data-usage agreements to clients.

Scalability and Future Expansion

The architecture was built for scalability.

Next phases included:

• Integrating more platforms like EatSure and Uber Eats (UAE).

• Introducing AI-based price forecasting models.

• User notifications for price drops and flash discounts.

• Launching an open API for third-party price tracking tools.

This positions the app as India's first live food price comparison engine powered by Actowiz Solutions.

Broader Industry Implications

For Consumers

Transparent pricing leads to better value and trust.

For Restaurants

Cross-platform pricing visibility helps maintain brand consistency and margin control.

For Aggregators

Such tools encourage healthy competition and fair pricing models.

Why Actowiz Solutions

• Proven expertise in FoodTech and Quick Commerce data scraping.

• AI-driven pipelines handling dynamic pages at scale.

• Comprehensive delivery: data feeds, dashboards, and API integration.

• Track record across Zomato, Swiggy, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and MagicPin data projects.

• Client support and SLA guarantees for uptime and accuracy.

With robust experience in menu data scraping, delivery price monitoring, and discount analytics, Actowiz Solutions has become a trusted partner for FoodTech innovation.

Want to build your own real-time price comparison or food delivery data platform? Actowiz Solutions can power it with scalable web scraping APIs and AI-based price intelligence.

Conclusion

This project proved that real-time food price comparison is not only technically possible but also a high-value consumer utility.By combining AI, web scraping, and smart data engineering, Actowiz Solutions enabled a startup to deliver live pricing transparency for Zomato, Swiggy, and MagicPin users.

Impact Highlights

• 3 platforms integrated | 12 k + restaurants | 150 k + menu items monitored.

• Near real-time updates every 10 minutes.

• 97 % accuracy | 20 % average user savings.

The success of this solution positions Actowiz Solutions as a leader in Food Data Intelligence and Aggregator Price Monitoring across India and global markets.

Learn More >> https://www.actowizsolutions.com/real-time-food-price-comparison-zomato-swiggy-magicpin.php 

Originally published at https://www.actowizsolutions.com