What Is Ecommerce Competitor Price Monitoring?

Ecommerce price monitoring has become an inescapable aspect of market research and planning since ecommerce. But, with so much competition, how can you go through all the data? Price scraping automates this time-consuming operation, making it a breeze.

We are all buyers. We all buy items, from food to clothing to appliances, and most of us evaluate prices to find the best deal. Before purchasing the washing machine with the best price-quality ratio, our grandparents visited several stores. Thanks to the internet, we can now do the same thing without even getting out of bed. We surf websites, compare costs, read reviews, and then purchase our desired product.

This means that businesses must ensure that their prices are competitive. However, this implies that they require information on their competition. Enterprises use online scraping for market research, pricing scraping, and ecommerce price monitoring to acquire this competitive intelligence data.

What Exactly Is Price Scraping?

The process of mechanically obtaining pricing information from the internet is known as price scraping. It employs web scraping tools to scrape data from websites and download it in structured data formats, as the name implies.

The sheer volume of data necessitates automation, particularly in businesses where prices vary by the second, such as finance and travel. Ecommerce prices are variable because retailers can swiftly boost prices during peak hours when sales and online traffic are higher and lower them for the rest of the day. These pricing schemes necessitate real-time information and checking once a day is no longer sufficient.

 Pricing methods aim to determine a price that covers the cost of manufacturing while keeping the product competitive. As a result, rival ecommerce price monitoring is critical. As the vast amount of information available on the internet grows increasingly overwhelming, businesses are increasingly turning to web scraping, either in-house or through outsourcing.

What Is the Purpose of Ecommerce Price Monitoring?

There are various reasons why lowering rates may be beneficial to your company. Most websites have APIs, but they might be highly restrictive because website owners decide what information can be collected through them.

It is entirely up to you to pick what data to collect via web scraping, as long as it is publicly accessible.

With user-friendly interfaces and simple input options, price scraping solutions make online scraping accessible. Web scraping has numerous challenges (such as CAPTCHAs and the necessity to employ proxies at times). It can be challenging even for experienced programmers, especially if you need to build a tool from scratch. On the other hand, businesses like Apify make web scraping more accessible by providing ready-made solutions that require only simple input - such as a URL to scrape or keywords.

Here are some compelling grounds for price reductions:

Competitive Intelligence in Real Time

Ecommerce companies frequently adjust their product prices several times per day. Knowing when and how they do so provides insight into their pricing strategy and aids in planning your own so that you, too, may modify rates at the appropriate time. To gain insights, one-time rival price scraping is insufficient: you must use continuous ecommerce competitor price monitoring procedures and collect up-to-date data frequently to obtain real-time findings.

Pricing Policy

Creating an effective pricing plan is critical for converting website visitors into consumers. If your marketing approach is practical, you will receive many visitors to your website, but this is insufficient. You want those visitors to buy your products rather than merely look at them. Pricing strategies assist you in boosting your revenues by displaying competitive rates so that customers would choose your product over similar items.

Brand Tracking

Your company's website is likely not the only place you sell your products. You should also promote them on high-traffic, reputable websites where you can benefit from the reseller or reviewer's reputation, customers, and policies. You must, however, guarantee that these websites follow fair price compliance and that your pricing strategy is up to date on all platforms. Scraping the pricing of your products regularly provides you with a quick and efficient overview.

Analytics

Scrapping prices enables firms to understand their clients better, beginning with how they think and what they prefer. For example, when customers are most likely to make a purchase influences how much you can raise your rates. After you have gathered all the ecommerce competitor price monitoring results and applied your pricing plan, the following step will be to analyze the outcomes and make any necessary changes.

Price scraping can provide you with the information you need to compare prices among competitors.

What Is the Process of Price Scraping?

Even for programmers, web scraping is not always straightforward. However, if the scraping activity is not very hard, price scraping programs make it more accessible. The following are the primary stages required to accomplish web scraping (and ecommerce price monitoring):

1. Determine Your Competition

The first stage in pricing monitoring is competitor price analysis based on product kind, price range, geographic area, etc. You've probably already thought of a few competing names. Manually search for them online, or scrape Google Search results for product or category names.

2. Collect Pertinent Information

Each company is distinct. Because you are unlikely to sell every product your competition sells, you will not need to scrape the entire online store. Concentrate only on products that are important to your investigation. Scrape the product page URL, or even better, utilize product codes such as SKU or ASIN so that even if the URL of the product page changes, your scraper will still scrape the correct product.

3. Export and Examine the Results

It is possible to extract findings in various forms; however, choose one that is easy for you to read, interpret, and analyze. You can import a CSV file into a spreadsheet directly or use a ready-made connector like Zapier or Make to send data elsewhere.

If you encounter any difficulties in your ecommerce price monitoring procedure, use our guide to overcome the most frequent web scraping challenges.

Outsourcing vs. In-House

Some businesses have in-house web scraping programming teams. However, because programmers require specific training to become effective in online scraping, and pricing scraping operations gradually increase in number, this frequently becomes a strain on the organization. As a result, increasing personnel are needed to keep up with maintenance, infrastructure, data extraction, and data analysis.

The most efficient strategy may be to retain your web scraping crew while moving web scraping to a dedicated platform such as Vserve. This way, your programmers won't have to worry about infrastructure upkeep and can instead focus on specific scrapers.