USE CASE:
The real work behind platform detection for Canadian companies
Everything below is about one job: platform detection for Canadian companies, done in a way that survives a list rather than a single lookup. The tools we name are Mamba Labs Apify actors, priced per row, and Ecommerce Platform Profiler is the one pointed at Canadian companies.
The problem
Canadian companies and platform detection: the answer is public, scattered, and nobody has time to collect it. Start from this: Canadian companies file, publish and advertise under local rules that no global dataset models properly, and platform detection follows. Know this about Canadian companies before any platform detection: coverage from any vendor drops off a cliff outside the English speaking market. There is 1 runnable example of platform detection for Canadian companies below.
The method
- Start with one of Canadian companies you already know, so a wrong platform detection answer is obvious rather than plausible.
- Run Ecommerce Platform Profiler across your list of Canadian companies, which carries 1 ready made setup for platform detection.
- Read ten rows of platform detection on Canadian companies by hand before you trust the rest of the list.
Traditional Search Tools
- The national company register, for Canadian companies. Free, authoritative, and in its own language.
- Wappalyzer. A browser extension that answers this instantly and free for occasional use. It has an API and a list price when you want it in bulk.
- BuiltWith. Deeper history and lists of sites by technology, which is the reverse lookup and often the more useful direction. Priced as a data product.
- Store directories. The app stores of the major platforms publish merchant lists. A ready made list of confirmed users, for free.
- View source. Open the site, view source, search for the platform's signature. Thirty seconds if you know the signatures, and they are all documented publicly.
Preconfigured tasks
A task is one of these actors with the inputs already filled in for a specific version of this job. Open one, swap in your own list, and run it without setting anything up from scratch.