Price Tracking and Analytics Using Web Scraping

Price is one of the most important factors for your customers when making purchases online. That is why any change in pricing, whether for your products or those of your competitors, can have a direct impact on your business’s bottom line.

To stay on top of their pricing strategy, companies may need to track the prices of their products and compare them with competitors' prices several times a day. Fortunately, gathering competitive pricing data is no longer a tedious, time-consuming, and inaccurate task. Now we can easily automate the collection of competitive pricing data using web scraping.

Competitive pricing intelligence is the knowledge of how the market and competitor prices influence purchasing decisions, as well as the use of web data to make better pricing, marketing, and business decisions. With the right data, you can optimize your pricing strategy and increase your business profitability.

In this guide, we will cover three of the most common and important use cases where companies track, monitor, and analyze competitor and market pricing data to make informed pricing decisions.

•     Competitive intelligence
•     Dynamic pricing
•     MAP monitoring

Competitive Intelligence

Web scraping is an excellent tool for monitoring competitors, products, and prices, as well as assessing market trends to gain an overall understanding of the market. Competitive intelligence can be used to ensure your pricing strategy remains relevant. This is particularly useful for brands and e-commerce companies.

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing takes competitive intelligence to the next level by combining competitor pricing data with internal data to make automated pricing decisions. This allows companies to be proactive and regularly adjust pricing based on real-time demand, supply, and competitor metrics.

MAP Monitoring

If you have multiple retailers selling your products, you should always monitor them to ensure there are no violations of minimum advertised prices. Monitoring retailer/reseller prices is an excellent way to get an alert on price violations so you can take appropriate action to address the issue.

Price Scraping vs. Price Analytics

Price scraping is when spiders browse website data to extract necessary information such as price, product, description, etc., and then present it in a structured, readable format. But it is not as simple as it seems. In many cases, scaling data extraction can be very challenging.

Price analytics adds additional layers to the collected data, providing actionable insights that can be used to develop a comprehensive pricing strategy. The process includes many stages such as URL discovery, data extraction, data matching, data quality assurance, as well as reporting and analytics.

Simply put, price scraping is the extraction of large amounts of raw price data from the web, while price analytics is a deeper process that combines high-quality collected data with quality checks, analysis, and reporting.