Scraping Prices From Websites: Top 5 Amazing Benefits

In this era of technology, times are changing. People want to be their own bosses and be in charge of their own future. The online platform opens up huge opportunities for this. Starting an e-commerce business has become more accessible than ever before. And people are taking advantage of this.

Each year the e-commerce industry grows at an unbelievable speed. The online stores face severe competition not only in popular product markets but also in niche markets. That’s why more and more entrepreneurs turn to fresh idea generation to boost their competitiveness in a rapidly expanding market.

However, it can be difficult to figure out how to start an e-commerce. You need to have a certain plan and strategy, in order to start a competitive business. Considering the amount of information available, it can be pretty hard to analyze all the data and create a plan of action. This is why data harvesting and web scraping services are crucial for the successful launch and operation of your business. There are quite a few benefits for web crawling and specifically price scraping.

Why Pricing Strategy Matters

Creating a strategic pricing strategy will increase profits and put your company in a more competitive position. Strategic pricing is all about establishing the company’s price levels, understanding its competitive edge and value creation. In general, strategic pricing combines the best pricing strategies that will compliment your overall business strategy and the industry in which you operate.

And of course, determining a good pricing strategy is also a practical decision, as your business can’t succeed if you don’t earn enough to cover costs.

See what some of the leading retailers say about price monitoring:

Almost 24% of product developers devise price revise strategies every day by tracking product prices of their competitors.
30% of companies perform the price monitoring process at least once a week.
According to another statistics, 18% of individuals track prices once a month.

So it’s crucial that you create a winning pricing strategy for your business. E-commerce price scraping will help you to keep up with all the changes and monitor the pricing strategies in your industry. Scraping prices from websites are here to offer your business so many benefits. Data crawling of prices can provide you with all the needed data. By analyzing this data, you will be able to get ahead of the competition and make unique offers. Below are the top 5 benefits of scraping prices from websites.

#5 Pricing Trends

You can’t set a winning price strategy if you don’t follow the industry trends. When a new product or an innovation debuts into the market, it’s essential to identify the pricing behavior and user interaction of that product. Data harvesting and online price scraping are an effective way of identifying pricing trends.

What data crawl does is that it digs deep into the webpage and extracts all the relevant data you might need. Afterward, the crawled data can be used in many different ways based on the specific needs and wants of your company.

If you want to get an insight into the pricing trends, you can use the crawled data. For example, you can try to identify a similar behavior or any data that drops out from the whole picture. Moreover, keeping track of the prices will ensure that you’re aware of any changes that are happening in the industry.

As a result, you’ll be up-to-date if the prices start moving upward or downward. Based on these, you’ll be able to make your analysis regarding the pricing trends.

In 2018, there were four main trends that were on the pick:

Dynamic pricing – product prices continuously adjust in response to real-time supply and demand.
Customized pricing – customers have different willingness to pay for similar products. Hence, companies provide different cross and up-selling options to help differentiate prices.
Behavioral pricing – in this strategy, prices are adjusted based on the data about them. Behavioral pricing is price discrimination.
Digital pricing – digitalization means revising pricing model to be more beneficial to the customer. At the same time, to have an uplift on the provider’s bottom-line. This is the strategy for new business models.

It’s pretty obvious that you can’t follow these trends without having data on them. Web scraping services will help keep track of everything that’s happening in the industry. When you have all the data you need, it makes your trend analysis more efficient.

#4 Competitor Analysis

If you want to create a competitive strategy, you have to track your competitors’ prices, see how they change and what strategies they follow. Identifying competitors’ prices is crucial for understanding minimal and maximal prices sets. You need to establish a competitor price monitoring strategy, in order to follow all that’s happening.

Web scraping and data crawling will ensure that you have the freshest data of any price data. Don’t wait for your competitors, while trying to achieve a competitive edge in the market. Monitor their prices on a daily basis or at least several time per week. This way, you will always be a step ahead of them in the professional area.

There’re many benefits of scraping prices from websites on a daily basis. Here are some of them:

Competition in online retail happens in real-time – in certain industries, prices are being changed every day. In fact, there are even some industries, where prices change even more frequently than once per day. For example, consider the petrol and diesel industries. They use dynamic pricing and change prices on a daily basis.

Staying proactive regarding competitors’ pricing – it’ll save you a lot of time if you work with a web scraping service that does online price scraping for you. A web scraping service company will provide you with fresh alerts and reports on competitors’ product prices on a daily basis.
Getting visibility into price dynamics – price tracking on a daily basis will give you visibility on literally how prices change over time. You will see how your competitors react to your prices or the trends and strategies they adopt. Only a regular price tracking will ensure to get such certain visibility into price dynamics of your industry.
Tracking competitors more often than they do – most companies don’t understand the value of competitor price tracking on a regular basis. In fact, some don’t do tracking at all. So, if you do competitor price monitoring on a regular basis, you are most surely getting yourself more competitive in the industry.

Regular price monitoring will lead your company to have a strong and efficient pricing strategy. The crawled data can be used for creating a competitive pricing strategy.

#3 Pricing Strategy

The marketing efforts of your products, along with website optimization are indeed irreplaceable for your business. But they are useless if you don’t have a strategic pricing strategy. Strategic pricing is what drives your sales while keeping shoppers engaged. Scraping prices from websites are not the only data you can crawl when creating a pricing strategy. There is a lot of other useful information you can data crawl from the website.

Consider web crawling the inventory of your competitors. There are two ways inventory scraping can be used:

– When you do online price scraping, you can spot the products that don’t show prices.

Prices of the products are not shown when they are out of stock. So the crawled data can be used to determine the inventory stock of products.

When you know which of your competitors’ products are not available, you can use this information to adjust your own prices. If you have those products in stock, you can temporarily increase their prices. Although this can be considered a price discrimination, many e-commerce businesses use this technique.

– The crawled data of your competitors’ inventory can be also useful for finding new and fresh ideas.

Products scraping from both your small competitors and giant retailers like Amazon will give you insights on the performance of the products. You’ll be able to spot the best-selling products, along with the products that are selling well, however, you don’t have them in your inventory. This is very important for staying competitive in the field.

With such information, your inventory will be stocked with a better variety of products.

Engaging your customers with new limited-time offers, seasonal sales and special products depend on creating strategic pricing. The holiday spending statistics show a huge sales boost during special seasons, thanks to a competitive pricing strategy. Web scraping competitor websites for product lists, inventory and prices will give you a hand in developing a pricing strategy.

#2 Price Monitoring

From what we’ve covered so far, it’s now obvious that scraping prices from websites will give the opportunity to continuously monitor the prices all over the web. Having a winning pricing strategy is about optimizing the prices rather than increasing them. Web crawling and online price scraping will keep your company updated about all the changes that are happening.

Web crawling doesn’t offer anything more than just raw data. However, since the process of web crawling can be very time-consuming, it’s much better to outsource the work to a web scraping service. Having regular data under your hand, you’ll be able to better visualize what’s happening in the industry. Data visualization is crucial for better analyzing and understanding the data.

It’s important to track the price changes in the market. Nevertheless, it’s equally important to test your own prices and act on a winning strategy. For example, find a price that’s winning with the number of sales of your products.

Afterwards, check on your competitors’ prices at the time. If you find that their prices are higher, then you know that you can command a price premium.

Use intelligent monitoring. Make your price changes more calculated and increase the intervals between changes. This way, you’ll be able to measure your products’ elasticity. In addition, you’ll get insights on where you have pricing power or where you need to be more competitive to win over the customer.

By scraping prices from websites, an e-commerce store will never be left out of information on pricing trends and changes.

#1 Unique Offer

Scraping prices from websites can offer a lot more than just getting data from the web regarding prices. When you get so much data on prices, analyzing the information will give insights on things like trends, best-selling products, and inventory stock. All these efforts will lead to creating a unique pricing offer. So each of your target groups will get a perfect offer, based on competitor research, pricing trends and price monitoring.

Scraping prices from websites, and data harvesting, in general, will give your business material to digest and analyze. So you’ll be able to create a unique offer for the website visitors that will boost your e-commerce store sales.