Scraping the Web in Competitive Marketing

The dawn of the internet era brought a massive amount of people (and data) only at a click’s distance through websites. Every connected user leaves an online footprint and adds to the scattered raw data which requires an expert analysis before it could be used as information. The web pages as a structured document allow those gazillions of pages to be used information data sets. It was this gargantuan volume of information that replaced the use of ad-hoc software users with bots unless the website explicitly prevents it.

Web Scraping tools sieve out data from the web pages in a format entirely based on our requirements and leaves the structure of the document unscathed. With Big Data becoming the future that will affect all the industries, websites as an abundant source of data have become the most lucrative part of the deal.

As the data may update dynamically, most of the extensions and tools look out for these changes and web crawling software and browser extensions. Static information can also be stored offline in various formats (CSV, JSON) for unlimited access.

update the results automatically. Depending on the parser used in the scraping tool, the data can be exported into a format that allows improved visibility. Now when nary of the sites are written in pure HTTP, developers have to focus on handling multitudes of processes and calls made by scripting languages like JavaScript- which itself is backed well by a large no. of libraries that provide loads of functionality, handle Ajax calls and also maintain session cookies. This increased up the demand for both advanced standalone

Web crawlers, or bots, can essentially be an alternative term for scraping albeit defining themselves physically as well. These bots use the sitemap to crawl or navigate the site to extract the data. The parser can identify and select the tags of different type and mine them categorically.


Competitor Price Monitoring

A Noble tool for a fierce world

Of the most immediate applications, Competitor Price Monitoring is the hottest areas where web scraping services are employed. With rapid market extension and outreach thanks to improved digital services via numerous competitive e-commerce services, the game that is business has changed. competitor price monitoring solutions provide comprehensive competitor statistics, from tracking price fluctuations in related products, categorizing the price ranges along extended periods of time, to predicting the product behavior in the market based on the company’s history and trending-to-upcoming factors that influence the consumer’s and competitor’s online activities. This hugely improves the strategizing policies as companies can observe and assess their market performance in real time.

Easier business terms and improved entrepreneurial environment has thrown a lot of competitors in the field, creating an unprecedented competition among the various branches of manufacturing and services sector. With a vast myriad of options available, it comes naturally not only for the consumers but also for the enterprises to monitor the options available for the users in the parallel marketplace. This has converted even the task of comparison into a competitive market itself. Professional

Using web data scraping for financial growth

There is vast amount of data available on the Internet in various formats. A simple search would reveal too many results. If you try to implement a manual process of sieving through all of this data, imagine the time that you would spend to collate the data. Also, this may have a direct impact on the time-to-market, which will affect your timely business growth. Many business require specifically the price related information. Your business organization can utilize this price information to gain a competitive edge against your competitors.

However, all of the data available is not free of cost and some are even protected. To pose another challenge, the data that you require may be available across multiple sites and categories. If you try to collect the data manually, it would be time-consuming, error prone, and not cost-effective. Also, the data is available in different formats that may not suit your needs and make it tough for you to compare, analyse, and make the correct decision.

Your organization requires verified and specific data for regular analysis at a predetermined frequency to ensure that you are make timely decisions. These decisions will have a direct impact on your sales and revenues.

By utilizing our web scraping services, you can extract useful data from multiple sites and categories. We also provide this information in a standard format that suits your needs. Web data scraping is a way to get the price related data so that your organization gains a competitive edge over your competitors.

To be a successful organization, you need innovative ways to collect the required data and present it effectively. We at ITSYS Solutions share our expertise and experience to help you get the required data in real-time that suits your specific requirement. This also provides you with competitive price intelligence data from multiple sources with 100% accuracy to ensure that you’re among the first to know about your competitor pricing and product changes.

How to have best Web Scraping Solutions

With the changing era, the competition has grown and eventually the retailers are coming across various challenges. Today here in this article we’ll be focusing upon the requirements that a web scraping solution provider must fulfill. Accept it or not, you cannot compromise with your web crawling solution provider when it is about the strategy and moves for your business. Here we’ll be taking a sneak into those hidden secrets that will help you in selecting the best data crawling tool vendor. Let us scroll down to find those most important seven questions that you need to ask yourself before choosing a website scraping solution vendor for your retail business:

1- Did you check the specific Matching Capability?
Always remember that the dynamic scraping software vendor’s matching engine should be as good as you can have. The reason behind is that the accuracy of the competitors’ products and prices directly depends upon it. You need to be pretty sure that the tool that you going to have, avails the highest possible coverage.

2- Did you check the Expansion Capability of your Tool?
Beginning with products and competitors of smaller set is might be preferred by retailers in general.

With this I mean to imply that without any compromise with performance and quality more number of products can be compared. You need to keep in mind that in case of having masses in hand, and tracking those products and prices ranging to millions and billions; remember the scalability must not be compromised.

3- Quality assurance of Data Accuracy
Pricing of data needs to be accurate, slight up or down might invite instability. For this you need to be sure that the QA goes swiftly. Remember market is tough and rude; it never gives a second chance to correct the mistakes. The quality assurance checks based on human scales revolve on regular basis and they also assure the 100% accuracy.

4- Experience and expertise counts
Some people consider ‘web scrapping’ as simple website ‘scraping’ but wait, it isn’t so. You need to take it seriously and work over it with utmost dedication and should have a technical team that has enough experience to keep you in market. The structure of websites leaves a mega impact on them; this further brings in the challenge to perform extraction, web crawling and data analysis well. Also remember that all the matching engines aren’t same, a poor decision will bring in inaccuracy and incompleteness in data.

5- Can your system be integrated?
It has been noticed that there are retailers who integrate back-end systems with web scraping services. If you have a good set of Application Programming Interface code, the IT team might find easy to surf the monitoring tool at the back-end systems.

6- The money too keeps the importance.
Money is important when you talk business. Retailers have been seeing paying hundreds and thousands of dollars to have competitive pricing data manually collected or to combine manual data handling with scraping tools. The technology has further made the pricing data collection easier in comparison and moving further due to automation the cost reduced drastically. Thus you can now very easily find the web scraping services at a very low rate.

7- Did you know about SaaS?
Yes I’m talking about the Software-as-a-Service basis. You can find website scraping software providers these days which allow you to pay on a monthly basis for the subscription of service. Thus the beginning and growth is entirely in your hands.

Conclusion that concludes beginning:

Keeping the highest quality competitive pricing data and vendor will make pricing profitable, manageable and easier. So remember you need to have a competitive price monitoring solution provider with a flexible, technologically-swift and smoother work and can impeccably gather the statistical needs of the company.

Web and Mobile Application scraping solutions

A software technique for extracting information from the websites is known as web scraping. This software technique helps to extract large amount of data from websites and can be saved to a local file in your computer or laptop.
The ones who require this software technique face a lot of problems and challenges. There are several web data scraping vendors available which confuse the user which one is the best. To solve their confusion here are few important questions which will help the retailers while selecting a data scraping solution vendor.

1. What Is Your Tool's Specific Matching Capability?

A dynamic app scraping software vendor matching engine is more accurate and will help the user track competitor’s products and prices easily. At the time of selecting your vendor be sure about the tool. It should provide the highest level of coverage in order to avoid missing of any important data.

2. What Is Your Tool's Scalability (Expansion) Capability?
There are some retailers who wish to slowly add on the products to be matched and compared rather than adding the products at once. They track a small set of products and competitors and then slowly add more to the list. The most important thing to be taken into consideration is never take the performance and quality for granted.

3. What Can You Tell Me About Quality Assurance Of Data Accuracy?
Accuracy is supreme. Any error, mismatch or mistake will end your game. When it comes to pricing data, accuracy is the foremost important thing. One should not only relay on the software, human-based quality check is a must for 100% accurate data.

4. What Is Your Company's Technological Expertise And Experience?
It is very much important to work with a strong, dedicated, experienced technical team which can meet all hidden challenges while providing good web scrapping. Take advice of retail technology expert’s in order to make the flow easy and accurate of your web scraping information.

5. Is Your app scraping System Integra table?
It’s very much important to thoroughly check the API’s the vendor offers. A good set of APIs is critical to allow IT to easily stream all the data collected by the Python web scraping tool to your back-end systems.
6. What Should I Expect To Pay For These Services?
With the arrival of cutting edge web scrapping solutions the market has become competitive and tough. Good and proficient web data scraping tools are now easily available at low cost.

7. What Kind Of Contractual Flexibility Might I Expect?
There is no hard and fast contractual process. The retailers can subscribe to the service by paying for the tool on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis in which they can start small and then slowly can increase as they become comfortable with it
Conclusion:
To make your pricing easier, more manageable, actionable and profitable choose the highest quality competitive pricing data and vendor. A flexible updated and easy to work industry leader should be your choice.

Key Aspects in chosing Pricing Intelligence Solution Provider

With swiftly changing commercial environment, retailers are now looking for most effective and efficient price intelligence tool solution. This is extremely essential for retailers, who take into account their competitor’s pricing on everyday basis, to choose the best vendor for their business. Making this decision is one of the most vital moves for a business, as it can easily make or break the pricing strategies.
Here are 7 most essential things to keep in mind while choosing a pricing intelligence tool vendor for your business:

Price
Price forms one of the prime consideration while selecting the right pricing solution provider for your business. During the days gone by, the companies used to pay a huge amount for collecting the pricing data of the competitors, manually or through basic data scraping tools. In today’s techno-commercial world, the cutting-edge automated pricing intelligence tools have not only made pricing data collection easier than ever, but has lowered the costs to a great extent.

Coverage
In this world of technological tug-of-war, it is not enough to only keep an eye on the competitor’s prices. It is also very important to compare the prices by matching your competitor’s products with your own. The better the intelligence tool, the better gets the ability to track competitor’s products and prices. This is what refers to coverage. Make sure that the pricing tool you choose, provides you with the highest levels of possible coverage. This way you will never miss out on the vital data ever.

Technology Proficiency
As the websites today differ significantly in terms of the product information they provide and structuring, pricing intelligence is surely not an easy task to perform. These differences put forward a various challenges related to extraction, data analysis and crawling. Choosing an inefficient pricing intelligence tool can lead to inaccurate and incomplete data extraction. Hence, it becomes truly important to have technically proficient team, so as to be able meet all such challenges.

Guarantee of Quality
Monitoring pricing data is all about accuracy. There can be no room for mistakes as any error directly affects the business. Even when the pricing intelligence tools are automated, manual quality checks must also be done on regular basis, so ensuring and verifying data accuracy.

Integration
It is very important to carefully check and negotiate on the customization of data formats provided by the vendor, so as to allow the easy integration with the back-end systems.

Flexibility of the Contract
While choosing a pricing intelligence tool provider, don’t get carried away with a long contract. There is usually no such complicated contract to be signed. Most of the pricing tool providers today offer an option of subscribing to the services and paying on monthly basis. One can also avail some discount for making complete payment at a time. This is commonly known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model of subscription. This will allow the business to start with a small amount of money and a comparatively lesser number of competitors to track.

Scalability
In most cases, the companies wish to start with tracking fewer number of competitors and products and then scale up with time. As they scale up, it is important that the tool provider scales up the operations without compromising the performance and quality. Keep in mind to never take quality and performance for granted, thus never compromise while choosing a pricing intelligence tool provider.

Some Last Words
The online businesses are faced with a number challenges and nobody wants to be left behind in the race.  It is hence very important to use the service provider that will help you in having a competitive edge over the other. We at ITSYS Solutions, offer a SaaS based web crawling service at less than $5/day*, that allows you to scale up as per your requirements. Our dedicated team of programmers are able to customize the output data formats so as to allow easy & quick integration with your existing back-end solutions. For a free consultation and a demo, visit us at www.website-scraping.com or call at +1-(518) 481-3433

Five Advantages Of Web Crawling For Manufacturers

The Internet, after the wheel, has been the most important invention in history of mankind. Just like all other sphere’s of our lives, it has disrupted barriers across trade & commerce and left web crawling technology and actively monitor prices of their products.

manufacturers with little or no control on the retail price of the product they manufacture. The ease of setting up an e-commerce / marketplace venture has increased retail competition and vastly improved availability and access to products across the globe. This increased retail competition has had both brick & mortar stores and online retailers slash prices often by sacrificing margins and at times selling the product below cost price. Such practices lead to negative opinion in minds of consumers as they tend to feel cheated by the manufacturer. To gain control and protect their brand, manufacturers can make use automated

An automated and managed price monitoring service will allow the manufacturer to 

1. Identify Sellers
On the Internet with marketplace model, there are thousands of sellers and it is not possible for the manufacturer to know all sellers. Our automated price monitoring solution allows the manufacturers to keep track of all sellers on multiple platforms.

2. Ensure sanctity of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
Many a times, manufacturers define MAP and trust sellers to respect this price. Unfortunately, MAP violations happen and products are under-priced to get volumes and sales. Such situations can be tackled by having an alert system wherein manufacturers are notified on MAP violations.

3. Monitor price wars
Manufacturers need to take control of price wars as that could result in loss of trust with sellers and Price monitoring service provides manufacturers the tools to ensure a level playing amongst sellers and avoid price wars.

consumers. A rogue seller who may have dropped the price below the MAP could force other sellers to drop prices too leaving the manufacturer no way to identify when and who dropped the price first.

4. Safeguard brand value
High variation of prices, negative feedback across distribution channels or grey market activity can inflict irreversible damage on the brand value of the product. By constantly monitoring products on the various online distribution channels and feedback platforms, manufacturer can take remedial corrective action and safe guard the brand value.

5. Strengthen business relationships
Enforcement of MAP by manufacturers promotes an environment of fairness and equality thereby strengthening relationships with seller and distributor networks. Swift action on violations also helps preserve brand image, boosts credibility and increases trust.

The automated and managed price monitoring service from ITSYS Solutions allows manufacturers to keep track of their products – both price and feedback across multiple online platforms and ensuring a healthy competition amongst its sellers without affecting their credibility. All this and more benefits at just $10/day (Conditions apply). For analyzing your products catalog, schedule a free demo by visiting us at website-scraping.com

Advantages of automated Web Crawling in Competitor Price Monitoring

In today’s connected world, shopping is done at click of a button or swipe of finger. A majority of shoppers compare prices across portals before buying any product. Therefore, it is extremely important for the online retailers to keep a track of the prices of products on their competitor sites. An automated web crawling solution, the technology powering the Google search engine, can provide online businesses with prices from competitor sites in real-time boosting efficiency and bottom line.

Top 5 reasons for automated price monitoring solution

1. Stop tedious manual data search and entry work: Deploying people to search for prices of hundreds of products on multiple websites is a daunting, time-consuming & costly process prone to errors. The high cost in monitoring of prices would add to the
   
   cost and make the entire process futile. Web crawling solutions removes the need to have a team of people do the copy-paste job and provides data within hours.

2. Get a broader analysis of the market: An automated competitor site monitoring solution, allows monitoring of unlimited number of products, giving a broader analysis of the market. One can easily and anonymously get the prices of products that competitors are selling at.

3. Never miss a price change: In fast changing online world of e-commerce, having information on time is critical and is more often than the difference between making a sale or losing it to your competitor. Automated Web crawling solutions allow monitoring of products on real-time thereby providing market intelligence on competitor prices as it happens.

4. Minimize human error: Data entry is prone to errors and requires hours of multilevel checks to get 99% accuracy. Automated web crawling solutions are not only speedy but provide the same information with 100% accuracy at a fraction of the cost.

5. Focus on business: By leveraging the power of automated web crawling solutions, business owners are able to spend their time doing what they are best at – strategizing to improve bottom line by being more responsive to market changes and taking informed decisions.

To sustain in this competitive environment, keeping track of competitor prices is become essential for online retailers. Automated price monitoring service by ITSYS Solutions, anonymously captures data from targeted websites in real-time and with 100% accuracy, at a cost that allows businesses to stay competitive.