🛒 Continente Portugal Grocery & Supermarket Scraper

High-speed, institutional-grade product catalog & pricing scraper for Continente.pt (Portugal's leading hypermarket and supermarket chain). Extracts retail food products, promotional discounts, unit prices (PPU), packaging sizes, barcodes, and deep 10-level category hierarchies.

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⚡ Why Choose This Scraper?

• Ultra-Fast & Lightweight: Built directly on fast HTTP request pipelines and embedded impression data. Does not run heavy headless Chromium instances, saving you up to 85% on Apify compute costs.
• Institutional Quality Schema: Adheres strictly to the GROCERY-PLP 31-attribute institutional standard used by leading data marketplaces and retail analytics firms.
• Deep Promotion & Price Tracking: Captures both current discounted price and regular strikethrough price, promotion badge tags (e.g. -25%, PVPR), and secondary unit economics (€/kg, €/L).
• Comprehensive Category Hierarchy: Flattens up to 10 nested category tiers for seamless database indexing and categorization.

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📋 What Data Does It Extract?

Every scraped product record includes:

• Identification: Unique Product Code / SKU (product_code), Brand name, Full Product Title.
• Pricing & Currency: Regular / Full Price (full_price), Discounted Sales Price (price), Currency (EUR).
• Unit Economics: Price Per Unit (ppu), Unit Type (kg, l, un, etc.).
• Promotions & Badges: Promotion Type (e.g. -20%, PVPR), Award Badges (e.g. Produto Premiado, Bio).
• Product Details: Package / Quantity description (e.g. emb. 1 kg, garrafa 75 cl), Availability status (Disponível).
• Category Tree: 10 distinct level columns (category1 to category10).
• Media & URLs: Direct product page URL on Continente and high-resolution product image URL.

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🛠️ Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
categories	Array	No	["frescos", "mercearia", "laticinios-e-ovos"]	Categories to scrape from Continente.pt.
searchQuery	String	No	null	Optional keyword search (e.g. cafe, leite, azeite).
maxItems	Integer	No	100	Maximum total products to extract across categories (0 for unlimited).
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	null	Apify Proxy configuration (Datacenter or Residential proxy).

Example Input (JSON)

{
  "categories": ["frescos", "mercearia", "laticinios-e-ovos", "bebidas-e-garrafeira"],
  "maxItems": 250
}

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📦 Sample Output Record (JSON)

{
  "website_name": "continente.pt",
  "competence_date": "2026-09-21",
  "country_code": "PRT",
  "currency_code": "EUR",
  "store_id": "",
  "product_code": "7092144",
  "product_std_code": "",
  "std_type": "",
  "brand": "Continente",
  "product_title": "Azeite Virgem Extra Clássico Continente",
  "package_desc": "garrafa 75 cl",
  "full_price": 8.49,
  "price": 6.99,
  "ppu": 9.32,
  "unit_type": "l",
  "promotion_type": "-17%",
  "promotion_end_date": "",
  "additional_tags": "Bio",
  "additional_content": "Disponível",
  "category1": "Mercearia",
  "category2": "Azeite, Óleo e Vinagre",
  "category3": "Azeite",
  "category4": "Azeite Virgem Extra",
  "category5": "",
  "category6": "",
  "category7": "",
  "category8": "",
  "category9": "",
  "category10": "",
  "itemurl": "https://www.continente.pt/produto/azeite-virgem-extra-continente-7092144.html",
  "imageurl": "https://www.continente.pt/dw/image/v2/BDVS_PRD/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-col-master-catalog/default/dw12345/7092144.jpg"
}

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💼 Ideal Use Cases

1. Supermarket & FMCG Price Monitoring: Track real-time grocery prices, promotional cycles, and price elasticity across Portuguese retail.
2. Food Inflation & Macroeconomic Indexes: Gather daily commodity baskets for consumer price index (CPI) modeling.
3. Retail Brand Competitor Audits: Monitor private-label brand positioning against multinational FMCG brands (Nestlé, Unilever, Danone).
4. E-commerce & Grocery Aggregators: Sync product catalogs, nutritional attributes, and active promotional discounts.

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🔒 Proxy & Compliance

Continente.pt delivers stable performance over standard HTTP connections. For regular batch runs (< 1,000 products), default Apify Proxy settings are sufficient. For store-wide sweeps (> 20,000 items), enable Apify Proxy with mild request delays to ensure consistent availability.