The short version
Shelfbee is a registered Canadian business that compares grocery and household prices across Canadian retailers. To do that, we read publicly displayed product and price information from retailer websites and digital flyers, and present it to shoppers so they can compare. We keep our footprint light.
What we collect
For each item we track, we record only what a retailer shows publicly:
- The product name shown on the retailer's listing
- The advertised price and pack size
- Whether the item is on sale, and the regular price if shown
- The product page link on the retailer's site
- The image the retailer publishes for the product (we link to it; we do not rehost it)
- The store and approximate location the listing applies to
We do not collect, parse, or use any personal, account, or session data. We do not access anything behind a login or a paywall. We focus on individual product and price listings, not bulk catalogue copies.
How we read retailer sites
Most retailers we cover publish a product catalogue that any browser can read. We read it the same way, at most one request every three seconds per site, identifying ourselves as ShelfbeeBot with a link to this page. We check each site's robots.txt before the first request and record the result with every run.
The Loblaws-platform banners (No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Loblaws, Fortinos, Your Independent Grocer, Zehrs) display prices through a shared product API that their own websites call for every visitor, using a public key included in each site. We call that same API directly, with the same key, under our own name and rate limit, rather than driving a hidden browser through their pages. That API host's robots.txt permits only Google's crawler. We read that as an instruction aimed at search-engine indexing rather than at a price-comparison service answering the questions a shopper would, and we have chosen to continue on that basis: openly, throttled, and with an automatic stop on the first refusal (a 401, 403 or 429 response ends the run). We would rather have a data relationship with Loblaw than rely on our reading of a robots file, and that request is part of our outreach. If Loblaw, or any retailer, would prefer that we stop, the process below applies and we will honour it within a business day.
Retailer requests
If you operate a retailer website and would prefer that Shelfbee not include your listings, email hello@shelfbee.ca and we'll remove your domain within a business day. We'd much rather work with you than around you — if a structured data feed or a partnership suits both sides better, we're glad to have that conversation.
How we present prices
Our results follow the Canadian Competition Act's rules on accurate advertising. We never claim "cheapest in Toronto" or similar absolutes — we show the lowest price among the stores we track, with the time it was last checked displayed on every listing, and a reminder to verify at the store before you buy. Shelfbee stores all user data in Canada.
Contact
Press or partnerships: hello@shelfbee.ca. Questions about how we collect prices: hello@shelfbee.ca.