Consumers nowadays are constantly looking for discounts, special offers, and compare prices in different online businesses. Therefore, you, too, as a business owner, should be alert and check how prices fluctuate among your competitors. It would be best if you were up to date on pricing so that, you too, can offer your customers better deals. Consequently, you will retain your customers and even reach more.
Web scraping is one of the best methods of extracting data- to be specific, pricing- from your competitors' website.
Different firms and service providers offer web scraping services. You can get these services for free. Some companies give out free proxies. However, this is not recommendable due to poor quality. You can look for companies that sell web scraping API at an affordable price.
What is Price Scraping?
Price scraping is the process of mining information about prices from target websites. There are specific reasons you can scrape prices, e.g., equalize your prices to those of your competitor, analyze the market, etc.
Price scraping helps you to know your position in the market field, improve your products or services, and set excellent prices for your products or services.
What is Price Monitoring?
Price monitoring is the process of checking the market prices as frequently as possible. It is the tracking down of your competitors' products, their pricing, and whether there are promotions or discounts.
A web scraping tool, such as free proxies and web scraping APIs, is easy to monitor prices.
When you monitor prices through web scraping tools, it is also known as price scraping or competitor price scraping, or price watching.
Is Web Scraping For Price Monitoring Legal?
Web scraping is legal so long as the data is in a public domain and you extract the information ethically. By ethically, it means mining the data carefully without overwhelming the specific website. Overwhelming a website could lead to it slowing down or even shutting down. That should not happen when scarping prices.
Uses of Price Scraping
The following are actual uses of price scraping.
E-commerce Competition
Competitors' price is so standard among online retail shops. They keep changing from time to time. Keeping track of all your competitors' shops can be tedious. Having a web scraping API that monitors the prices is essential. The price scraping tool will scan all your competitors' prices and analyze the costs. I will even adjust the price on your shop if you have set it to be so.
Building market Trends
Web scraping tools will be able to monitor market trends and the price even from history. For example, if prices go down or up during the holidays or discounts given at a specific time. Thus, allowing you to sell a product on a subscription basis will build your market and reach more customers.
Hotel price monitoring Services
Customers can book rooms in hotels through price scraping when the price is lower during a specific season. Also, you can raise your fees during particular times without losing customers. For example, during the holidays, you can add an enticing service and put extra charges when people go on vacations. Customers will visit—eventually leading to the growth of the Hotel business.
Stock Market
Currently, forex trading has become very popular. There has been the growth of cryptocurrency. For people who are trading, price scraping is critical. It will help them know when best to sell or buy.
Ways to make Web Scraping Effective in Price Monitoring
There are several ways to ensure efficacy in price monitoring through web scraping. These are:
- Use the right software
- Set an automated scheduler
- Analyze data obtained
- Identify trends
- Compare prices and make wise decisions
Benefits of Price Monitoring to Your Business
Build Popularity on Having the Lowest Prices during Certain Times
With research on how much your competitors are selling something, you can lower your prices and be advantageous. For example, if you sell makeup products and influencers spread the word that your prices are lower, many people will buy from you. Consequently, your new customers may hang around to be constant customers and buy even expensive goods.
Lowering prices could only go wrong if your competitors are doing the same, and there is no way of going below them.
In Seasons of Low Competition, You could Increase Prices on a Product
If you sell a product that has minimal competition, price scarping will help you realize it. Thus, you can increase the price and make more profits than before. For example, if you are the only one known for selling original electronics, you can maximize the advantage and make good profits.
Understand Consumers' Taste
Through price monitoring, you can understand the consumers' preferences. If a product's demand has subsided as per the day and there is no change for a month, you can know what the consumer doesn't want. It could be a sign of a new product in the market. With this information, you can search for the new product and be the first to stock it.
Timely Running of Promotions
You do not want to be running a promotion on a particular product only for you to realize that your competitors did slash the prices. How disastrous can that be?
With price scraping, you can gauge when the best time for you to run a promo is.
Save Money Shopping
Price scraping is not only for the seller but also for the buyer. With web scraping tools, you can compare the prices of different sellers and settle for the cheapest. You can also know when there are clearance sales and take that opportunity to buy at a discount.
Having the online pricing tool will link you to the best seller.
Discover Competitive Products
Apart from being competitive, you also want to know which products are doing well in the market. When a low-margin product starts picking up and saturates the market, you can choose to pick on the product or focus on something else, less competitive.
Conclusion
In conclusion, price scraping is a crucial process for both the seller and the buyer. For effective scraping, our scraping software should be of high quality to avoid incurring losses.