The competition in Ecommerce industry is fierce. The growth rate and investments in this industry has raised the bars of competition like never before. With so many options available to compare product price on different Ecommerce platforms at once, customers are saving a lot while shopping online. Considering this, pricing intelligence in the Ecommerce industry has become crucial for business growth. Web crawling is one of the most viable options for monitoring the price in your competitors’ catalogue and adding to intelligence to the price plan in real-time. Here is how web scraping can help in competitor price tracking.
The prerequisites
To get started with a competitor price tracking set up, you only need to know the competitor catalogue URLs and the data points to be extracted. For price monitoring, you will need to extract data points such as product name, product id, variant info and price. Outsourcing the web crawling process is a better option considering the complexity of the task.
How price monitoring works
Price monitoring is done by setting up web crawlers to fetch data from product pages at a predefined frequency. Programming the crawler is a technically demanding task that requires coding skills and continuous monitoring (as websites can change their structures). The target pages are first examined to find the html tags that enclose the required data points. Once identified, these tags are coded into the crawling setup. When the crawling setup is deployed, it starts extracting and saving the data into a dump file. This dump file is then processed using a cleansing and structuring setup to produce clean data. This processing will remove the unnecessary html tags and text that got scraped along with the required data. It also gives the data a proper structure so that it can be used for further analysis and storage in database systems. After complete configuration, the crawling setup can give pricing data feeds at specified intervals.
Key Takeaway
Correct pricing structure is pivotal in the midst of ever-increasing competition, as it can significantly boost sales. Web crawling and data extraction service helps you efficiently monitor your competitors’ pricing model and intelligently price your products. Considering we’ve long standing experience in helping our clients track their competitors’ pricing, reach out to us now to explore how we can help you.
