How Price Scraping Can Give Your Brick-and-Mortar Store a Competitive Edge

by DataHen

Whether as a brick-and-mortar store or as an online Shopify store – if you run a business that sells products, you need data. This is especially true if you run a brick-and-mortar store. You won’t be able to get ahead from your competitors if you do not have an online presence and don’t collect data that’s on the internet.

In the 21st century, data is your biggest weapon that will make your business successful.

The internet is a data gold mine which can give you the information you need to make smart business decisions. Using data scraping services, you can find out:

  • What are the best products to stock in your store
  • The ideal price points for your products
  • What potential customers are demanding from stores like yours.

In addition, regular data crawling and price scraping will help you identify important trends in your market.

In this article, we’ll show you exactly how price and product scraping, through web scraping, will help your brick-and-mortar (or online store) succeed.

1. Know The Difference

Anticipating and reacting to your competitors is the only way to get ahead of them. The reason this is important is that you and many others are competing in the same market, going after the same customers. And without outsmarting your competitors, you risk losing customers.

So, what can you do?

With a web crawling service, you can scrape websites online and get information on what your competitors are doing. You can find out what products they are stocking, how much are they charging for each individual product, what discounts they’re giving and more…

With this data you gain from your competitors, you can then create a strategy on how you can differentiate yourself from them. You can create better promotions and discounts, stock complete new and unique products and improve your pricing.

In that way, you can further establish your business by making changes to it.

2. Outsmart Your Competitors

Your competitors aren’t the only ones who you have to analyze. It’s also extremely important to pay attention to what your customers are saying. As they say, ‘the customer is always right’. So, listening to their invaluable advice, figuring out their needs and wants and fulfilling their demands will surely bring you ahead of your competitors.

Here’s how it works.

People love sharing their thoughts and their experiences on the internet. On social media, comment sections, forums and review sections, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of mentions of products you and your competitors are selling. You’ll also find reviews of the stores themselves, too.

Using data crawling you can scrape millions of these reviews, both from social media sites and from competitor stores. With this data, you can find which products customers are looking for, which products they don’t like, what kind of services they expect from a business like yours, and other valuable feedback.

This will give you intimate knowledge of your customers.

You will be able to figure out what products you need to stock, which services to improve, what pricing strategy to employ. And that’s not all, you will also get a sense of how customer demand shifts throughout the year, understanding the seasonality. This will further help you prepare for promotions and discounts at the right time. You’ll be able to reduce friction in your supply chain and much much more.

What this will do is that ultimately, you will improve your customer service. You will be able to stock a diverse range of products that fit customer demand. You will employ pricing strategies that attract them towards making a purchase. And most importantly, you will be able to make those kinds of changes that make shopping at your store a pleasurable experience.

But here’s the thing, it’s important to regularly use a scraping service. Doing so will help you collect the latest customer data. The popularity of a product or service can change overnight. So, to stay updated with the latest trends, regularly web scraping prices, reviews, feedback, and mentions of your store is a must.

3. Plan and Conquer with Price Scraping

Price scraping and data crawling just once is not enough. To get the most benefit, this practice should be continuous and consistent. If you don’t regularly collect data, you will not be able to get the ‘big picture’.

By the ‘big picture’, it means that you won’t be able to identify trends among your customers and competitors. The market is an ever-changing entity. Some products sell well during some seasons and don’t do well during others. Competitors discount prices at one time and increase them at another time. Some products become obsolete and outdated within a year while others stand the test of time.

It’s your job to figure out when these things happen.

Nothing is worse than stocking products that don’t sell well, running out of items that do sell well and/or losing profits because you didn’t properly price your items in your market.

These unfortunate situations can be avoided with web crawling services.

Ultimately, the goal of data crawling and price scraping is to identify trends and patterns in customer demand and market activity. This will allow you to prepare your business strategy in advance, to succeed in such a competitive market.

You will know when to order new items in advance to avoid shortages, what item to order in what quantities depending on consumer demand and how to strategically price the items so you get max sales.

Conclusion

So far, we’ve told you how price scraping can help you:

  1. Discover new and exciting business strategies from your competitors.
  2. Uncover customer demand so you can make small and big changes to your business.
  3. Help you identify trends and patterns as to how the market operates.

The last thing worth noting is that you won’t get all this data overnight. This is a slow and gradual process. Regularly scraping prices, products and reviews from websites will help you build a database. The trends and patterns you want to see will only materialize when this database grows. But whenever it does, you can be sure it will help you make smart decisions for your brick-and-mortar (or online) business.