A lot of stores and companies want to make things better for their customers and be even more successful than other businesses they’re up against; this is why keeping track of prices is an integral factor.
Price monitoring helps you undercut your competitors to help you optimize your pricing strategy. If you are wondering whether price monitoring is crucial for your business, read on.
What is price monitoring?
Price monitoring is looking at what other stores charge for items so you can figure out how much to sell your own things for. It’s about watching what those other stores are doing with their prices today, both the things that go on inside their businesses and the phenomena everyone else can see.
Watching what your competition charges for items shows you if they’re raising or dropping their prices today. Knowing this, you can change your own prices to get more shoppers to notice you.
It’s really handy because these days people always look up prices on the internet to see who’s selling items cheaper before they actually buy anything. You must carefully look at how much your rival is charging so you can make your prices a bit lower than theirs.
Plus, you can keep track of your prices to look at what they’ve been before. It’s handy for making a great marketing plan that’ll get you more money.
Benefits of price monitoring for business
There are numerous advantages of price monitoring for businesses. They include:
Builds Reputation
Price monitoring, especially in a competitive market, can greatly help build your reputation. It can help you establish the best price possible that will give you a competitive advantage on the market.
Understand Consumer Preference
If you want to do well in the industry, it is important to understand consumer preference. However, this can be difficult since it keeps changing. Fortunately, price monitoring can help you to track historical data to help you keep in track with the ever-changing consumer preference.
Track New Sellers
Other than monitoring the market condition, price monitoring can also help you monitor when new sellers in your target category enter the market. This is important since they can come up with pricing strategies that may undercut your prices.
Establish an Alternative Price
You can keep an eye on prices and decide different costs for your items when you’re not selling much; this can really work well when you have sales going on. It helps make sure your sales efforts pay off.
What makes web scraping crucial for price monitoring?
If you are considering keeping tabs with your competitor’s prices, then e-commerce scraping may be what you need.Web scraping is a price monitoring tool that involves using web crawlers or bots to extract data or content from websites and then replicate it elsewhere. An example of a web scraper is price scraping.
In this type of scraping, scraper bots are used to scrutinize the business database of competitors to find out what they are charging for their products. Most business owners resort to price scraping since they want to offer the lowest price possible that will make them competitive. Besides, price scraping lets you gather prices of competitive products and monitor any changes that may occur. It especially comes in handy when you have a lot of competitors and documenting their prices one at a time would be time-consuming.
It’s made to gather a large amount of data from several different websites. After you figure out who you’re up against, you can get the bots to grab the data for you. If you want to beat them, it’s informed to make your prices a bit cheaper than theirs.
You should note that the process of scraping using bots requires you to have technical knowledge. However, if you can’t use bots, then using third-party scraping tools will do the trick. Click here to learn about price monitoring tools that will help you gather pricing data.
Main challenges of web scraping for price monitoring
Even though keeping an eye on prices can help you keep up with other sellers, it’s not always easy to do. Some problems with collecting data from websites make it really hard to watch prices include:
Bot access declined
A tough thing is when certain websites won’t let bots in. Those sites are good at noticing when bots or web crawlers are performing activities and can say no to them. A lot of times, the site will block their internet address. If this happens to you, you could ask the person running the website if it’s okay to collect their data–but don’t get your hopes up – they probably won’t say yes.
CAPTCHA
If you are a frequent internet user, you have probably come across the word CAPTCHA. Most websites use this tool to tell whether it is a human or a scraping tool trying to gain access.
Varying page structures
If the site you want to grab data from has mixed-up kinds of pages, you’ll probably hit roadblocks trying to scrape content; that’s because most scrapers are made to handle one type of page setup.
IP blocking
Some websites use the IP blocking mechanism when the server detects multiple requests from the same address. This can also happen when the web crawler makes a high number of multiple parallel requests.
Dynamic websites
To attract more users and give them an exceptional experience, most website owners are ensuring that their websites are more interactive and user friendly. Such websites have incorporated dynamic coding practices that work against web crawlers.
Summary
Keeping an eye on prices is key for any business trying to beat rivals by offering products at good prices. With solid price monitoring, you can follow all the important characteristics about what other business people in the market are charging.
Web scraping can make this possible by targeting one or more websites and extracting their pricing information. However, you should keep in mind the many challenges that you are likely to encounter during the web scraping process.
