CactusPlay - Marketplace for games and in-game items

Challenge

CIS gamers buying PlayStation and Xbox titles faced a fragmented market: official store prices varied significantly by region, gift card resellers were scattered across forums, and there was no single place to compare and buy. Co-founded CactusPlay to fill that gap — a marketplace for games and in-game items with real pricing data from official sources.

The core technical challenge: PlayStation Store and Xbox Store don't expose public APIs. Keeping thousands of SKUs priced accurately in near-real-time required building a scraping and synchronisation layer from scratch.

Discovery

Initial research mapped the full buyer journey: discover a game, compare price across regions, buy the cheapest legitimate key, redeem. The pain was at the compare and buy steps. Sellers existed but were fragmented; buyers had no trust signals. A marketplace with consistent pricing data, verified sellers, and a clean checkout could own that middle of the funnel.

Options Considered

1. Manual price entry by admins — rejected. Doesn't scale; prices change daily, sometimes hourly during sales.
2. Third-party price aggregation API — none existed for CIS PlayStation/Xbox at the time.
3. Custom Node.js scrapers + WordPress/WooCommerce storefront — chosen. Scrapers give real data ownership; WooCommerce gives a battle-tested commerce layer without building checkout from scratch.

Decision

Node.js scrapers running on a cron schedule hit PlayStation Store and Xbox Store endpoints, parse the response, and push price/availability updates to WooCommerce via its REST API. WordPress + WooCommerce handles the storefront, cart, and payment gateway integrations. Custom PHP extensions handle seller onboarding flows that WooCommerce didn't support out of the box.

Implementation

Built reverse-engineered scrapers for both storefronts — handling session management, region switching, and anti-bot measures. Set up a differential update system: only changed prices trigger WooCommerce updates, keeping API load low. A price-change alert system notifies admins when a product drops below a threshold, enabling promotional timing decisions.

Integrated payment gateways supporting CIS payment methods. Custom PHP WooCommerce extensions handled digital delivery (key codes) and seller payout logic. Deployed on a VPS with automated deployment via Git hooks.

Outcome

Thousands of game SKUs synced daily with zero manual price intervention. The platform handled real transactions from launch. The scraping infrastructure ran reliably for the duration of active operation, surviving multiple PlayStation and Xbox Store front-end redesigns through targeted selector updates.