With e-commerce coming into the picture, price monitoring has become an inevitable part of market research and strategy development. However, it is difficult to sort all the data because of the vast competition. Price scraping or web data extraction services can automate the entire process and make it efficient.

Consumers buy a lot of products on day-to-day basis whether it is basics like food or luxuries such as clothes or appliances. Most consumers compare the price of the product and go grab the best deal. Earlier, people would visit a few stores to find the best prices and now we can do the same from the convenience of our homes. Thanks to the internet! We can browse the websites and compare the prices along with checking the reviews online. Once we are satisfied, we can order the product of our choice.

Businesses need to ensure that their prices are competitive. However, they need a lot of data about their competitors. For collecting this enormous data businesses are taking resort to web data extraction services. It helps businesses in market research, price monitoring, as well as price scraping.

What Is Price Scraping?

Price scraping is the process of extracting pricing data automatically from the web. It makes use of web scraping tools for scraping the data on websites and storing it in a structured format. Several studies show that price plays a significant factor in the customer’s decision of whether or not they wish to buy a product.

Almost 87% of online buyers state that it is a determining factor when making a buying decision. Right from regular customers to hardcore bargainers, e-commerce has several buyers from all age groups. A significant percentage of millennials spend almost half of their budget on online shopping. Thus, businesses need to implement a competitive price strategy for attracting more customers to their products. The best strategies can only be created on the basis of the data.

Purpose Of Price Monitoring

There are many reasons which make price scraping beneficial for your business. Most websites these days have APIs but they are quite limited because the website owners decide what information can be extracted through them. It is your choice as to what data you wish to scrap if it’s publicly available.

Web data extraction services can make web scrapping accessible via user-friendly interfaces. Web scraping comes with its own challenges which can make it tricky even for experienced programmers. However, specialized pricing scraping tools can make scraping more accessible owing to ready-made tools. You simply need to input the URL or keyword for scraping.

Here’s a Look at How You Can Benefit from Price Scraping:

1. Competitive Intelligence

E-commerce businesses change the price of their products several times a day. When you know how often and when they change the prices offers insight into their pricing strategy. The insights help in developing your own pricing strategy. It will enable you to change the prices at the right time. One-time price scraping is not sufficient for getting insights. You need to implement price monitoring practices for regularly collecting updated data and getting real-time results.

2. Pricing Strategy

The key to conveying website visitors into customers is creating a great pricing strategy. If the marketing strategy designed for you works, you will notice many visitors to your website. However, it’s not enough. The visitors i.e., potential buyers should buy your products and not simply look at them and leave the website. Pricing strategies enable you to increase the profits by displaying competitive prices. When customers have a look at similar products, they will choose you over others because of the competitive prices.

3. Brand Monitoring

The business website is not the only place where you can sell your products. You will have to promote them on other high-traffic and reliable websites as well. This will enable you to benefit from the reseller’s reputation, customers, and policies. However, you need to ensure that these websites follow fair price compliance as well as the pricing strategy is updated on each platform. Regularly using the web data extraction services can offer a quick and effective overview.

4. Analytics

Scraping prices enables your business to understand the customers better. It helps in getting a glimpse of what they like, how they think, what time they are likely to make a purchase, how you can increase the prices, etc. All this information can help in implementing the pricing strategy accordingly. The next step is to analyze the results of the strategy and take the necessary actions.

5. Get the Maximum Information

Being in the exposure to so much information, you need to sort the relevant and non-relevant data from your data bank. Now, when we say that there will be abundant information, we mean millions of data and going through that is not that easy. With price scraping services like WebDataGuru’s, you can achieve much more than desired.

For instance, you are an online clothing brand and you need to go on for the big Christmas sale. Now, you need information pertaining to the ongoing market trends and competitor strategies. So, with price scraping you can get valuable information like promotion, price range, competitor analysis, stock details and the like.

How does Price Scraping Works?

Web scraping might not always be easy but it can be simplified with the help of price scraping tools. Steps for implementing the web scraping:

1. Identify the competitors

The first step towards price monitoring is identifying the competitors on the basis of their product type, price range, location, etc. You must be having some competitor names in mind. You can manually look for them online or scrape Google search results for product categories and names of the products.

2. Scraping relevant information

Every business is unique and you might not be selling the same product as your competitor sells. So there is no need for scraping the entire online store. You can simply focus on the relevant products for analysis.

Scrape the product page URL or use the product codes. Even if the page’s URL changes the scraper will scrape the right product.

3. Exporting results and analyzing

The web data extraction services can extract information in various formats. However, you should choose a format that is convenient to read, understand, and analyze. You can also download the CSV file into a spreadsheet directly. You can also make use of any ready-made integration for sending the data anywhere.

Steps Towards A Great 2023

Considering the extent of competition, the web data extraction services can prove to be useful. The data derived from scraping can help in devising excellent pricing strategies for enjoying a competitive edge and earning profit.

Contact the experts WebDataGuru to get the best data extraction services for your business.