Competitor price monitoring – Why Use It

The market is dynamically changing more than ever. Competition is growing more stiffer and stiffer with each passing day but so are the business opportunities. Previously companies used to depend solely on manual tools and techniques to track price surges and they used to guess the market trends with minimal information. This meant inaccurate decisions and probably a counter move that depreciates the business even further.

In order to stay up, companies should know what is happening in the market and what the competitors are doing. Product prices are the main thing that may attract customers or vice versa. Many a time reducing price is the only option if you need to gain more customers but there is always a problem, and in this case, it is the competition from other business that can probably spoil your new move. They may reduce the price even further and by the time you become aware of it, you might have lost all the business opportunity linked with the product.

Competitor Price Marketing

You might have understood the role of competitors in affecting your business. To make your business profitable, you need to be aware of the competitor’s move and also about the customer price offers. Previously, this method was slow and used to be quite complex but today, with growing digitalization, this has become faster and more accurate. Today, software is available to keep track of competitor pricing and also about the latest product trends in the market.

Why use it?

Today’s market has become multi-dimensional and more diverse than ever before. Growing economy has lead to more products and more customers. This means more business but with this growth, there is also an increase in the businesses and therefore more competition.

To stay ahead of the competition and to get more customers, you need to make sure that you attract more people and one way of doing it is by offering the cheapest prices. This is where a Competitor price Monitoring can help you.

With this software, you can keep track of the competitor prices for the products you have tagged. This won’t only help you to adjust your prices in a better way but will also help you to understand your competitor’s reaction to the price changes implemented by you. This is how big MNCs like Amazon function. They keep track of the prices offered in the market and immediately match their prices to attract more customers.

As per a study, 74% of business don’t track their competitor for prices and this costs them thousands if not lakhs. Just with a competitor, you can enhance the business and can gain a huge technical advantage over your customer. This is exclusive for online retailers and therefore should be used extensively.

You can avoid a lot of mistakes while assigning new prices. Most businesses use Excel to record data and then this is used for predicting new costs. This is a slow process and there are huge chances of mistakes. Using Competitor Price Monitoring software can not only help you make better decisions but also will enable you to save time and resources, thereby increasing your ROI.

Recent Trends In Web Data Mining

Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to extract the knowledge available in Web data. It includes Web documents, hyperlinks between documents, usage logs of web sites, etc. Nowadays its trend to extract data from different sources and organizes them for better usage

Firstly it was a ’process-centric view’, which defined Web mining as a sequence of tasks. Second was a ’data-centric view’, which defined Web mining in terms of the types of Web data in the mining process. The attention paid to Web mining is  in research of software industry, and Web-based organizations. It is the chance to capture them in a systematic manner, and identify directions for future research..

Web data mining consists of 3 following tasks

• Resource finding: It involves the task of retrieving intended web documents. It is the process by which the data either from online or offline text resources are available on web.
• Information selection and pre-processing: It involves the automatic selection and preprocessing of specific information from retrieved web resources. This process transforms the original retrieved data into information. The transformation could be renewal of stop words, stemming or it may be aimed for obtaining the desired representation such as finding phrases in training corpus.
• Generalization: It automatically discovers general patterns at individual web sites as well as across multiple sites. Data Mining techniques and machine learning are used in generalization 4. Analysis: It involves the validation and interpretation of the mined patterns. It plays an important role in pattern mining. A human plays an important role in information on knowledge discovery process on web.

Many businesses have been adopting the process of data mining to catch up with others. Business taking important information through data mining is widely used for decision making purposes. Here are some recent trends in Data Mining are:

• Multimedia Data Mining: It is one of the latest processes to catch up because of growing ability to capture useful data from different sources. Different sources include audio, text, hypertext, video, images etc. and data is transformed into a numerical representation in different format.
• Ubiquitous Data Mining: This involves mining of data from mobile devices to get information of individuals. These having several challenges like complexity, cost privacy, etc. these methods has a lot more opportunities to be enormous in these type of industries.
• Disturbed Data Mining: Though data mining has gained popularity as it involves mining huge amount of information stored in different company location. To extract this data highly sophisticated algorithms are used to provide proper insights and reports based on them.
• Satial And Geographic Data Mining: The new type of data mining includes extracting information from environment, astronomical, and geographical data as image is taken from space. These data mining can reveal various aspects such as distance and topology which is used in geographical information system and navigation too.

Time Series and Sequence Data Mining: These type of data mining studies about cyclical and seasonal trends. It is helpful in analyzing random events occur outside normal events. It is mainly used by retail companies to access customer buying and their behaviors.

Taking up the E-commerce Industry – Price Monitoring Ideas

E-commerce comprises of companies that produce and sell software to businesses and corporations irrespective of their size. It provides a huge platform for businesses and customers to have a direct contact and then carry on buying and selling. This industry has exploded in the last decade and a half and some of the fastest growing companies in the world are e-commerce companies. Such is the impact of this industry. It basically makes the people’s lives easier and better and that is the reason for its humongous growth. This article focuses on this industry and some of the important aspects of e-commerce.

Key factors

Although an e-commerce company looks simple, it is nowhere close to being simple. There are a lot of things that go into making an e-commerce company and the industry on the whole. Some of the key factors that have to be analyzed and looked at include research and development, financial capacity of a company, price monitoring which looks at regulating and having a proper perception of prices and related aspects, technological innovation etc. These are some factors that have to be considered and analyzed while looking at the e-commerce industry as these are the core areas and pillars that keep the e-commerce industry afloat.

Competition

As it has been mentioned above, this has become a huge industry. This means that there are tons of e-commerce companies that are vying for a share in the e-commerce pie. This leads to competition and this is an extremely important dimension of business. A lot of innovation and advances in the e-commerce industry can be attributed to the competition. Companies, in order to keep abreast of their competitors, are coming up with high levels of innovation and invention. This can also lead to the loss of profits for the companies and the industry as a whole as companies cannot get a huge share and market space. The profits will be diluted. Since this industry is still new, there are a lot of chances and time available to pull away from the competition and become well established.

Technical aspects

E-commerce is purely based on technology and this is what makes it popular in the first place. There are various technical aspects that are involved like developing the platform, creating the connection between customers and companies, scraping which includes data and custom product scraping. This technological base makes the e-commerce industry very convenient and popular among the people. The ease of using these websites makes the people’s lives easier and better. This also gives a huge customer base for the businesses and people from all over the world can use and take the benefits of the e-commerce industry.

Conclusion

The internet has given some incredible things to the world and e-commerce is right on top of these things. E-commerce industry has companies and customers from all over the world. The e-commerce industry is tipped to become one of the biggest industries in terms of the money that it makes and generates. This industry will continue to grow and there is no looking back as the whole world is hooked to this industry.

Benefits of Web Scraping Services

The Internet is a huge reservoir of unlimited information. There are different tools to harness this energy of the reservoir in such a way that it is beneficial to the business and to the market in general. One of the tools used is Web Scraping. Web Scraping is a tool that is used for extracting information from different web pages and putting it together. Web Scraping is used to generate leads for the business, improved search engine optimization, reviews from the customers, the response to the product, comparing prices and other uses such as market research. There are different advantages of using web scraping services.

Advantages & Inexpensive

Talking about the small organizations, there are not enough resources that can be invested in order to collect data from different sources. Here, web scraping services come into the picture. Web scraping

services are inexpensive and do a very efficient work for the business. This helps the organization to do a very important job in a very budget-friendly manner. The data collected from different sources can be analyzed by using different software and required information can be obtained. There is a huge amount of data that can be collected at a low cost and used for market research.

Easy Implementation

Investing in a web scraping service is an investment that you will have to make only for once. Anonymous web scraping services are inexpensive on the first note and on the second, the web scraping services allow the gathering of information from all the different resources at the same time. There are different tools available which either help with gathering information from individual platforms or are involved in the analysis. This increases the cost of operation for the organization. But, while using web scraping services, these costs can be eliminated completely.

Low Maintenance and More Speed

This is one of the greatest advantages of using a web scraping service. Once the tool is installed on the system, there is not much maintenance required to run the software efficiently. There are many tools in the market that require higher processing power as the software upgrades. While using web scraping service, the processing power required remains the same and the software keeps running smoothly. Moreover, the web scraping service tools are light in nature. This means they will not slow down the system. The software will collect the information and store it without causing problems to other features of the system.

Accurate Data

It is important to have an accurate data when a market research is to be carried out. If the data is inaccurate while collection, it can lead to major risks while implementing. The processing of web scraping service is easy and fast. Although, this does not compromise the quality of data that it gathers. The data collected from different web pages is accurate and sorted. As you choose the higher versions of the web scraping tools, the data gets more filtered and better quality of the data keeps getting collected.

Conclusion

There are different advantages of using the web scraping services. There are some disadvantages too which have to be kept in mind. All in all, it is important to choose a proper web scraping service for best results.