Price Monitoring Services

Online and offline retailers often emphasize their product quality, user experience, and customer service. However, modern consumers are in constant search of better price deals, special offers, and discounts. That’s why timely pricing optimization can help you offer your clients the best deals and increase your income. Amazon, for instance, adjusts its product price within 10 seconds after the competitor price fluctuates.

Price aggregator websites and services like Google Shopping, Pronto, NextTag, and BizRate help users compare prices among different shops or vendors. Showing the best deals in the market, they make the present-day digital retail realm highly competitive.

The statistics say that only a quarter of businesses evaluate their competitors’  pricing data. This provides you with a perfect chance to be better than the other 75%. All you need to beat the competition is to always stay up-to-date and form your pricing strategy systematically. Web data scraping can be of great help for the purpose.

Price scraping is a process of extracting prices from websites for specific purposes. For example, you can price scrape to set your prices according to competitors’ prices, to analyze the market, or to aggregate all prices for a specific good or service and sell that service on a subscription basis.

Being aware of all these aspects helps you determine your place in the market niche, improve your product line, and set optimal prices.

Price monitoring is a process of constantly “watching” competition or market prices. It allows you to track the 3 Ps – Products, Prices, Promos. Thus, you get timely insights into the assortment of products, recent stock additions, and discounts offered. Price monitoring allows you to track prices for trading purposes, which is vital in the cases when prices change every minute or even every few seconds.

With a web scraping tool, it’s easy to spot the products that are selling better, have discounts offered, and those with the minimum selling prices.

The retail sphere is the first and the most common example of where price monitoring is used, however, pricing intelligence is of vital importance in other spheres as well.

E-commerce competition

If you are the owner of an online shop, you’ve probably faced the problem of competitors’ prices. They can change at any moment, and to keep your prices updated, you have to monitor all your competitors’ shops. A web scraping price monitoring solution can help. This mechanism monitors and analyzes all your competitors’ prices and adjusts your prices based on the rules you set. For instance, if your main competitor slashes their price to $5 per item, the automated pricing software can set the price on your website to $4.99.

Stock market

Price monitoring tools automate many stock traders’ processes, such as monitoring the best prices for buying or selling assets.

Hotel price monitoring services

We have a few customers that build products based on hotel aggregate prices. They created services that help their customers book rooms at the lowest price available for a particular date.

Building market trends

Price scraping software allows you to monitor the market trends and price history of particular goods or services. Recently, we finished a project for our client to monitor Alibaba.com. Our solution monitors the website twice a day for specific categories of goods and store prices. After a month or so, our software was able to provide data analysis on trends and price fluctuation. Our client started to sell this service on a subscription basis.

To make pricing data scraping effective, you should use the right software that combines a data extractor for grabbing the requested data and a script to request data in the frequency set by the user.

More than that, you can set an automatic scheduler to monitor several businesses and compare multiple parameters like product data, specifications, prices, reviews, availability, and more.

After obtaining this data, you can analyze it, identify trends, make comparisons, and make informed predictions.

Regularly gathering product data

Through retail website scraping, you can always keep your product data up-to-date.

Knowing historical trends

With regular price scraping, you can figure out and analyze the changes that happened over the course of a certain time period; as well as monitor price trends among competing companies, supply and distribution channels, and partners.

Adaptating to price variations

Being aware of the pricing data from the sites and distribution channels of your competitors, you can quickly adjust and even automate your pricing.

Gaining valuable information

By monitoring your business rivals’ sites, you can study the complete list of their products and benchmark your trade against your potential competitors, as well as predict your future in the market.

The most important process of the obtained data is quality assurance. We need to be 100% sure that our scrapers extract correct prices and data; otherwise, a lot of money may be lost. We test our scraping software and data with the help of automatic software as well as manually, ensuring data accuracy according to our test plans.

DataOx provides both of the abovementioned services, and I’ll explain the difference. If you order data delivery of prices, you’ll get collected prices from the websites of your choice in a structured data format, such as Excel files, or a database. You can order this price scraping service once or on a regular basis. This kind of service is best if you want to analyze the market or your competitors’ price level.

If you instead intend to build a product based on a price scraping solution, your best option is custom price monitoring software development. Custom scraping tools ensure that all the clients’ requirements are met, and specific business details are taken into account. Thus, you get a unique solution without any unwanted or unnecessary features. This also may include insightful generation, filtering and modeling options, and other methods to resolve any variation in product names across the web.

To get a clear picture of what we can do for your project, schedule a free consultation with our expert!