How I Scraped Most Dark Stores in India - Blinkit, Zepto & Swiggy Instamart

The author of the article has successfully scraped data for dark stores across India from three major platforms: Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart. Here's a summary of their approach:

1. Blinkit:

   • Scraped store locations using an undocumented API endpoint.
   • Used a proxy service to rotate IP addresses and avoid detection.

2. Zepto:

   • Scraped data from the home page, which returns information about nearby stores.
   • Extracted precise latitude and longitude coordinates for each store along with their delivery geofence (a polygon of GPS coordinates outlining the store’s exact delivery boundary).

3. Swiggy Instamart:

   • Used a guest cart API to get detailed store metadata including operational status, internal store info, etc.
   • Utilized a sentinel loop to retry requests for offline stores until they came back online.

Key Takeaways:

1. Pre-filtering: Before scaling up the scraping process, reduce the number of coordinate points by using population density data (e.g., WorldPop) and rasterio to filter out less populated areas.
2. Validation: Always validate the response body explicitly rather than relying solely on HTTP status codes

Read the full article at InfoSec Write-ups - Medium

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