The Contemporary Guide: Price Monitoring & Competitor Monitoring

Introduction

Price monitoring is an essential component of market research and planning in the age of e-commerce. To sort through the data, one can use price scraping.

We all purchase goods, from food to clothing to appliances, and most shop around for the best price. We look through websites, evaluate products, compare prices, and read reviews before purchasing. Before purchasing the washing machine with the best price-quality ratio, our grandparents looked in a few different stores. Due to the internet, we can accomplish the same without even getting out of bed.

Check the concept of price intelligence and price scraping and demonstrate how it may help your business in this comprehensive tutorial. This post will give you the information and resources to thrive in today's fast-paced and fiercely competitive market, whether you run a small business or a major multinational.

Defining Competitor Price Monitoring

Keeping track of your competitors' prices lets you learn more about their goods, deals, and marketing strategies.

Utilizing competitor price tracking software will enable you to track your competitors' real-time pricing changes and stock availability.

Defining Price Scraping

The act of automatically obtaining pricing data from the internet is known as price scraping. It employs web scraping technologies, as the name implies, to extract data from web pages and download it in structured data formats.

As 87% of online buyers name price as a deciding factor in their purchase, studies suggest that pricing plays a crucial role in a customer's decision to buy a product. E-commerce draws customers from all generations, from casual price-sensitive purchasers to die-hard bargain hunters. In the US, 67% of millennials spend half their online budget shopping, compared to 41% of baby boomers and 28% of elders. Therefore, companies should employ aggressive pricing methods to attract more clients to the order confirmation page.

Pricing techniques aim to establish a price that covers manufacturing costs without eliminating the product from the market. Monitoring the prices of competitors is crucial.

What is Pricing Intelligence?

Price intelligence is a strategy that focuses on using intelligence (data mining techniques) to extract, analyze, and optimize prices, as the phrase "price intelligence" already suggests. In contrast to previous approaches, this gives businesses accurate real-time pricing data.

Importance of Price Monitoring

There are several reasons why reducing prices could be a wise business decision. Most websites provide APIs, but the website owners often restrict these.

Web scraping is made accessible by price scraping programs thanks to their user-friendly interfaces and basic input possibilities. You can choose what information to retrieve via web scraping as long as it is readily accessible to the general public. Web scraping has challenges for seasoned programmers (such as CAPTCHAs and the need to employ proxies occasionally). It can be challenging, especially if you build a tool from scratch. On the other side, using pre-made tools that you only need to supply with basic information, businesses like 3i Data Scraping make web scraping more accessible.

Here are some strong arguments in favor of scraping prices:

Competitive intelligence in real time

Many times, throughout the day, e-commerce companies alter the prices of their products. Knowing when and how they adjust prices gives you insight into their pricing strategy and aids in planning your price changes so that you can do the same. It is impossible to scrape competitors' prices once to gain insight. It would help if you continuously watched prices and regularly gathered up-to-date data to receive real-time findings.

Pricing Policy

Converting website visitors into consumers requires developing a solid pricing plan. Many people will visit your website if your marketing plan is effective, but more is needed. Instead of just looking at your products, you want those visitors to purchase them eventually. You can use pricing techniques to boost earnings by convincing customers to choose your product over alternatives by offering competitive prices.

Brand tracking

You can offer your products on more than just your company website. Additionally, advertise them on popular, reliable websites where you may gain from the reputation, clientele, and business practices of the reseller or reviewer. However, you must ensure that your pricing strategy is up to date across all platforms and that these websites follow fair price compliance. You may get a quick and practical overview by routinely scraping the pricing of your products.

Analytics

Businesses may better understand their clients by scraping pricing, starting with their thoughts and wants. For instance, when people are most likely to make a purchase has an impact on how much you can raise your costs. The next step will be to evaluate the outcomes of this approach and make any necessary adjustments after you have gathered all the price monitoring results and put your pricing strategy into action.

Benefits of Pricing Intelligence

It helps you do your job more effectively as a professional in the sales, marketing, or pricing department by providing the following:

More resources to expand your firm (no more manual oversight!)
Real-time pricing data that is accurate (no more awkwardness!)
Better pricing methods made possible by abundant data (no more educated guesses!)
increased likelihood of obtaining the Buy Box (no more being invisible on sales channels!)
Increased sales and competition (No more profit loss!)

Better customer opinion overview (no more incorrect values!)

Overall, by analyzing the industry and acquiring essential information from your competitors, price intelligence can help you improve your pricing strategy, increase competition, and increase conversions. You can also see a list of the top 7 reasons to utilize price intelligence software here if you are still trying to figure out its importance for your company.

How should Brands and Retailers use Price Intelligence?

Understanding the various implementations and solutions for price intelligence is essential for brands and retailers who sell products online.

Firstly, it's critical to comprehend that brands and merchants have different needs.

Typically, retailers pay closer attention to how other sellers are quoting the same products on various platforms. Utilizing such tools as:

Competitor monitoring
Dynamic pricing
Google Shopping Price Monitoring
Seller's real-time tracker

Working of Price Data Scraping

Even for programmers, web scraping is only sometimes straightforward. However, if the scraping activity is not very difficult, cheap scraping tools make it more accessible. The primary stages required to conduct web scraping (and price monitoring) are listed below:

1. Identify your competitors.

Finding your competitors based on product category, comparable price range, region, etc., is the first step in pricing monitoring. You already know the names of a few competing companies. You can manually look for them online or scrape the names of products or product categories from Google Search results.

2. Gather pertinent information

Every company is different. You won't need to scrape the entire web store because you most likely don't sell every item your competition does and vice versa. Just concentrate on items that will help your analysis. Use the URL or, even better, a product code, like SKU or ASIN, to scrape the right product, even if the URL changes on the product page.

3. Export outcomes and review

There are numerous ways to extract findings, so be sure to pick one that will be easy for you to read, comprehend, and evaluate. To send data anywhere you want, you can utilize a ready-made integration like Zapier or Make or download a CSV file directly into a spreadsheet.

Is it Legal to Extract Pricing Data?

Pricing scraping is authorized. You are not breaking any laws as long as you only use publicly accessible data, like prices, for scraping. However, certain companies, particularly those using dynamic pricing tactics, including those in the travel and retail industries, may take action to prohibit scraping bots because they believe that price scraping could offer their rivals an unfair edge.

Competitors gain an advantage by deploying bots to scrape pricing, but this advantage is legal. Since product prices are readily available online, it might as well be that several persons alternately sit in front of their computers and keep a continual check on them. Only you wouldn't want to do that because price-scraping bots accomplish the same task faster than you can.

What is the Impact of Scraping Pricing Data on Retailers

Automated price monitoring technologies have benefits, as was already mentioned, but nothing that would be prohibited. Price scraping has other effects on retail that, while not unlawful, might hurt the target company.

Price scraping bots make hundreds or thousands of queries to the target website's server as part of price monitoring. Scraping a company's website may slow it down or render it unreachable. Other users accessing the same websites may experience slowness if this server becomes overloaded with requests. Sales conversion rates may be impacted by potential consumers leaving their carts empty due to poor navigation.

Conclusion

3i Data Scraping provides unique solutions to your business needs and simple-to-use ready-made scrapers on 3i Data Scraping Store. You may discover a great illustration of a pricing scraping tool in this ready-to-use Amazon Product Scraper. Entering the URL of the Amazon page, you wish to scrape is all that is required.

For any web scraping services, contact 3i Data Scraping today!

The Contemporary Guide: Price Monitoring & Competitor Monitoring