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.

Competitor price monitoring - How It Works

Competitor Price Monitoring is a software put into use that helps in collecting a large amount of data and optimizing marketing, merchandising and pricing in a way that is brings you the maximum amount of profits. In a market where competition is extreme and unavoidable, this tool is essential as it can significantly help in taking strategic decisions and finding out what works the best for your business. It is ethical since it only uses information that is open for the public to see.

Finding your Competitors

Price Monitoring software require you to submit the websites that you wish to monitor, following which it does all the required work. The first step, however, is to find out who

Price Monitoring

exactly is your competition. This will determine the strategies that you’ll need to work on. One can do so with the use of social media by making a list or pool of every potential firm or company that might come close to your company’s revenue and profit, and rule them out one by one. This depends on your product as well as the level of competition.

Identifying Strategy

You need to determine how you would be pricing your own goods – i.e., either your focus will be on the market as a whole, or individual customers. It is essential to mix and match them all in a way that suits your needs and demands the best. Price Monitoring depends on the same as it helps in determining how others pricing would be affecting yours and to what extent.

Choosing the Right Software

It is very important to find just the right software, the one which fits your business the best. This would be helpful in web scraping and thus extracting information from all over the net as much as possible. These software help in increasing efficiency, reducing the time taken to complete a certain amount of work as well as lessening the scope of human error that occurs several times. Although all of the work can be done manually, choosing the right software will undoubtedly reduce the work load.

Benefits

Monitoring the price regularly can help a business understand the market as well as apply the best tactic that would be suitable for the given conditions. Moreover, these techniques do not cost much, which is beneficial for individual and small companies. Knowing the price of your competitors can give you an edge over them putting you in a much better position. According to these you can decide how you wish to decrease or increase price for profit maximization.

In order to make sure that Competitor Price Monitoring works well for you, it is important to put into use techniques of data mining and web scraping to generate information from websites that might be similar to you in several ways without making any changes to the source code. To have your share in the hectic and large e-commerce world, it is necessary to know this skill so that your business can prosper.

Web Scraping – A Collaborative Framework To Extract Data

Web Scraping Techniques

Web scraping is techniques through which the data can be saved to the personal servers in the file created and use them as and when required. As it is known data provided by different sites can only be referred online and cannot be stored or saved for the future use, this is a service in which one can save the data needed and then use it to refer whenever required in the future. There are many individual servers or companies that provide the service of website scraping through them and collect the data from any site or group of sites needed. They provide special services according to the client needs and thus they are one of the best sources to rely on for the data collection or storage issues.

Importance Scraping Data

Web scraping has gone along the way and has developed a whole of the organisation to develop them. Startups and business are the ones which are most

benefited from it. They help is data crawling from any corner of any website. Here is some of the importance listed.

• Helps to gain the track of things and trends happening around.
• Send the clients and the customers the details of modification easy with accurate details and the exact requirement.
• It helps in the extensive research and data collection for the company use and also helps them in the marketing accordingly.
• It can help to promote or market the company on a wider world i.e. internet and thus help to reach as many as possible people around.
• It helps and contributes to the growth of the company and thus can be one of the most important tools in the organisation
• It can be a Turing point to grow the organisation in the right direction to gain the profit and can also help to survive in the market.

Benefits

Using web scraping in the organisation can be beneficial many terms. Here some of the benefits are the discussion to give an overall idea about the service.

• Data can be generated or collected automatically.
• The service can scrap both the dynamic as well as static web pages to gather information.
• Data can be gathered from various sources.
• The data collected are accurate and reliable at the same time.
• Data mining can be done easily from the website.
• Price monitoring on various sites on the online platform can be done easily.

Thus, there are several benefits of web scraping in today’s online world where internet rules and can provide the organisation with the best.

Now, as web scraping helps and organisation for the growth it also faces certain challenges and which are mentioned below.

• It can cause damage to the web pages.
• The information which is obtained is extensive and is hard to find the right thing needed from them.
• Can be hard to operate for some people.

Conclusion

Thus, web scraping comes with a number of benefits but it also faces challenges and it is up to the organisation what they consider best and how do they use it for their best interest.

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

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.