Web crawling is one of the most viable options, extracting required data from your competitors’ catalogue, listed across multiple sites, as and when you required. Here is how web scraping can help in competitor price tracking.
How to Set Up Web Crawlers for Competition Price Tracking?
To get started with a competitor price monitoring set up, you only have to share the competitor catalogue URLs and the data points you need to extract with PromptCloud. For instance, data points can include product name, product ID, product variant information and price.
How Price Scraping Works
Data Requirements: Price monitoring is done by setting up web scrapers to fetch data from product pages at a predefined frequency. Programming the web crawler is a technically demanding task that requires coding skills and continuous monitoring (as websites can change their structures).
Web Crawlers Set Up: The source 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 web crawling setup is deployed, it starts extracting and saving the data into a dump file.
Data Normalisation and Data Delivery: 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.
Using Web Scraping for Price Monitoring
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.