Price Crawling is a method of monitoring prices that provides insights into market trends and competitive behavior. Businesses can efficiently gather and analyze price data from various online retailers using automated web bots and advanced tools.
This blog will explore price monitoring and how you can benefit from it as a company.
What is Price crawling?
Price crawling involves automatically collecting and monitoring various products from different e-commerce websites. Web crawlers scan and retrieve price information from multiple pages, providing valuable data.
Price crawling can be helpful for various purposes. It can assist you in conducting competitive monitoring, pricing strategy, market analysis, and price adjustments. The data enables you as a company to assess your position in the market compared to your competitors, allowing you to make informed decisions regarding your pricing strategies based on this data.
Price monitoring involves several steps. First, you need to identify the products you want to monitor. Then, the crawling robots are set up to visit the relevant websites and collect the necessary data. The collected data is then stored for later access and used to set accurate prices. When conducting price monitoring, it typically involves the following steps:
Identification of products: First and foremost, you need to identify the products you want to price monitor. This can be specific items, product categories, or even a particular online retailer.
Setting up crawling rules: The next step is to set up rules for the crawling process. This includes specifying which websites to monitor, what data to collect (e.g., price, product description, availability, etc.), and how updates should be handled.
Data collection: With the rules, a crawler robot automatically collects data from the specified websites. It visits the websites, navigates through product pages, extracts the necessary data, and saves it for later processing.
Data filtering and processing: Once the data is collected, it may be needed to filter and process it to remove unnecessary information or organize it in a more user-friendly form. This can include removing duplicates, normalizing prices, or adding additional attributes.
Storage and analysis: The processed data is stored in a database or dataset. You can apply various analysis methods and tools to extract meaningful insights from the data, such as identifying price variations over time, comparing prices between different retailers, or discovering patterns in market trends.
Price updating: Since prices can change frequently, it is important to regularly update the prices to maintain the accuracy of your data. This may involve regularly repeating the price monitoring process or implementing a continuous monitoring feature that keeps you updated with the latest prices.
Implementing the above steps is often expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. But how can your company access all this valuable data? Various pricing tools are designed and created for this specific purpose: to provide you with valuable data. These tools automate the process for you, but there is a significant difference in user-friendliness and how easily this platform can be accessed and managed to collect the desired data you need.
There are many benefits to using price monitoring for your company. The most significant advantage is the wealth of available data, which can be used to gain an overview of your competitive situation and help optimize your business and maximize your profits.
Considerations when using price monitoring:
If you embark on creating your price monitoring tool to help you crawl various websites, several factors must be considered. It is crucial to respect data protection legislation, copyright laws, and user agreements for websites you collect prices.
Product prices can change rapidly, so it is important to update your prices regularly to have accurate data. Implement a reliable mechanism for updating and collecting prices in real-time or at appropriate intervals. It would be best to be cautious about using price monitoring to collect data from your direct competitors in a way that may violate competition laws or lead to competitive issues. Last but not least, price monitoring should be used ethically and avoid overloading websites or causing disruptions in their operations.
PriceShape helps you climb up the list
PriceShape is a tool designed to collect prices from your competitors, ensuring you have relevant quality data for your analyses and basing your price strategies on it. Our platform is designed to be user-friendly, making it easy to navigate and stay informed about information and changes. Using PriceShape makes it easy to leverage Dynamic Pricing, giving you a competitive advantage in the e-commerce market.
Sum up
Price crawling is an effective method for tracking and conducting competitive analysis. Businesses and consumers can make informed decisions about pricing, offers, and market strategies by automating the collection and analysis of price data. However, it is important to comply with legislation, terms of use, and ethical guidelines to use price monitoring responsibly.
If you'd like to learn more about how we can help you, click here.
