With thousands of products being released every day, one of the sure ways to keep attracting customers is through your prices. But setting the right price can get tricky. A price that is ridiculously below the market baseline could have a negative effect. It could have potential customers questioning the value of your product and its capacity to meet their needs.
So, how can you set the right competitive price? Take your sales intelligence a notch up by scraping the prices of your competitors’ products. Use this data to develop effective pricing strategies. It will help you retain and grow your market share.
What is Price Scraping?
Manually collecting price-related information about your competitors’ products is time-consuming. And the errors would be numerous. Price scraping automates this process with the use of a bot or a crawler known as a price scraper.
A price scraper is a software that visits the websites containing the pricing information you need, such as e-commerce sites. It extracts this data and stores it in a database or spreadsheet for further analysis.
Besides saving time and providing high efficiency, price scraping makes it possible to collect real-time data. You do not have to worry about collecting your competitors’ prices only for them to lower their prices later and take over the market.
The Restriction in Price Scraping
An issue you are likely to face when you begin to scrape prices for sales intelligence is bypassing the security networks on websites.
Crawlers slow down websites, and website administrators are keen on blocking them from their site. Scraping prices to set a more competitive price for your products also interferes with your competitor’s pricing strategy. And it gives them more motivation to block price scrapers.
Proxies make it possible to bypass this issue. They provide anonymity, enabling you to visit websites without revealing your true identity and location. And in case your scraper is detected, the proxy’s IP address is blocked instead of your business’s address.
Let’s look at how proxies work.
A proxy stands between your device and the website you are price scraping. It prevents direct communication with the web server by making requests on behalf of your devices and receiving the responses as well. The web server is only able to see the proxy’s IP address and location, and not those of your device.
Proxy servers also make it possible to rotate the IPs. This means you can make each web request with a new IP address, reducing the chances of raising suspicion and getting blocked. Rotating proxies give the impression of organic traffic.
There are two main types of proxies you can use with your price scraper.
- Data center proxies
- Residential proxies
Data center proxies are artificial. They are issued by cloud server providers and do not depend on an internet connection or internet service. They have a fast connection, facilitating a quicker completion of projects.
Internet service providers issue residential proxies. The IP belongs to real devices, making them legitimate and hard to detect. They are best suited to scrape prices due to their low block-rate.
The Benefits of Price Scraping
Here are three ways your business will benefit from price scraping.
1) Maintaining Competitiveness
Price scraping ensures that you remain competitive in the e-commerce world. It enables you to set prices that attract price-sensitive customers. Real-time data makes it possible to know the best time to increase your prices and increase your profit margin without going above the competitors’ prices. It also keeps your pricing strategy up-to-date.
2) Brand Monitoring
Price scraping makes it possible to keep an eye on your products’ prices across multiple platforms. You can scrape prices from reseller’s product pages to ensure that they maintain price compliance. Brand monitoring through price scraping helps you maintain the prices for your products within a specific range, maintaining uniformity.
3) Understanding Price Dynamics
Price scraping gives you a better understanding of the market forces. You can assess the changes in consumers’ attitudes and buying behavior in response to price changes. You are able to comprehend pricing trends in your industry. Using these aspects, you can improve your pricing strategy.
Key Takeaway
It is vital to scrape prices from your competitors’ websites for your business to be successful.
In a nutshell, these are the benefits it provides:
- It enables you to set the right prices that determine how much revenue you make
- Determines the size of the market your business attracts
- Enhances your ability to remain competitive despite the emergence of new products from rivals
- Helps you monitor your products’ prices in the market to ensure there is uniformity
Price scraping provides real-time data, ensuring that your pricing strategy is always up to date. You can only achieve these benefits if you invest in a quality scraper and reliable proxies from a reputable vendor.