Competitor Price Monitoring Services

Are you in the process of identifying the most suitable pricing strategy for your business? If so, you need to invest time and resources on competitor price monitoring. This involves understanding your competitor’s product prices and using this information to either increase or reduce your own selling price. This knowledge can help you to come up with a pricing strategy that gives you an edge in your market.

Why is competitor price tracking important? Without having an idea of what the actual market looks like, it is impossible to offer competitive products and services. If you own a serious business, then you must look into your competitor’s prices. You are only going to make a sale if you find the right price point. You may be losing out sales to your competitors mainly because of your pricing.

Competitor price monitoring is especially crucial for eCommerce businesses. Before you even set up a business strategy, it is important to carry out a pricing analysis. Every effective business strategy is based on price. You can’t go against your competitors without knowing what they are charging and why. In case you want to come up with a very distinct pricing model, you must be able to justify this to your customers. You cannot defend your unique pricing model unless you know what other similar businesses are charging.

If your products are overpriced or under priced, your profit margins will be significantly affected. The process is done using specialized tools which compare the prizes on different web portals. You can get the prices of different retailers or manufacturers in your industry before pricing your products.

Monitoringcompetitor prices also allows you to make strategic decisions in your company. In today’s competitive e-commerce market, you cannot afford even the slightest mistake on pricing. If your products are overpriced, your profit margins will suffer tremendously. You will not be able to get the desired ROI from your business.

Monitoring competitor prices also helps you to understand your customers better. The price reports are obtained anonymously across thousands of retailers on the web. The process is not only accurate but also almost instant. You can understand what your customers want and make the right decisions based on accurate results. You can make reliable business decisions based on this information.

Automated tools are used in tracking competitor prices and this saves your organization time and resources. You don’t need to waste a lot of time doing this manually. Manual comparisons will not only affect your productivity as a business but they are prone to errors. Automated tools offer accurate results within a short time period.

Remember that, when conducting competitor price tracking, the main idea is not to identify the lowest bidder and offer the lowest price. You can cut down on the price of a few items until you establish a loyal customer base if you are still a new business. There are so many other strategies that you can come up with to give you a chance to sell your products or services in this competitive business world.

The Merits of Professional Web Scraping Services

If you are running a business, you will need to monitor how your competitor is doing. When you monitor competitor product prices, you will then be able to set prices that put you at an advantage. Web scraping, also called web data extraction, allows you to get this information. You could do the web scraping yourself, but hiring professional web scraping services has more benefits.

Different website admins employ different techniques to slow down and stop bots. These include blocking IP addresses, disabling web service APIs that the site’s system might expose, excess traffic monitoring and commercial anti-bot services. Others are using CSS sprites for the display of phone number, email address and other information, Web application firewalls, CAPCHA, using robot.txt and using honey pot and other method to identify automated crawler IP addresses. A professional will know how to go around these measures.

A professional understands the legal issues around monitoring competitor prices using web scraping. A professional will interpret the terms of use of the website you want to mine data from and this will allow you to make an informed decision. It is important that you be discrete when monitoring competitor prices and a professional will advice you on how to go about the process incognito.

Different techniques are used in web scraping and most are very complicated. Unless you have specialized skills and experience, you will need a trained and experienced professional to monitor competitor product prices. These techniques include text grepping & regular expression matching, HTTP programming where HTTP requests are posted on remote web servers using socket programming, HTML parsers, vertical aggregation platforms, semantic annotation recognizing and DOM parsing.

There are several web scraping software programs in the market. Hiring a professional for the task is important because he/she will know the best software. These software tools need customization to get exactly what you are looking for and only a trained and experienced professional will be able to do this. Custom scraping services will ensure you get the data you want whereas automatic web scraping might give you data you do not need.

A professional knows exactly what is available in different websites and where it is found. This visualization is important when using computer vision web-page analyzers for custom scraping services.

In some situations, human copy-and-paste is the most effective web scraping technique. Hiring web scraping services in such cases is important because this is a tiring and time consuming exercise that will interfere with your business. When you hire a professional, your whole team gets to concentrate on running the business. Most companies offering custom scraping services have an online presence, giving you cost benefits, anonymity and convenience. A professional will also give you tips on other methods that you could use to get the data you need. 

Business Intelligence Advantage By Web Scraping Data

In current business environment, trade barriers no longer exist and the logistics costs are down. Goods are manufactured at places with minimum cost of production and transported all over the world. The demand for products varies geographically and is price sensitive. In these circumstances, it is imperative to have the following information for business to grow

• Demand for products across different geographies
• Acceptable prices for products by consumers
• Availability and pricing of the raw materials and components
• Pricing and product descriptions of similar products from competitors
• Location and size of markets of a product of different competitors

With fast pace of innovations, a product in high demand can quickly become obsolete within a couple of years or maybe in some instances, a few months. In this scenario, doing business requires having intelligence information.

We at ITSYS Solutions specialize in web scraping and provide “hosted” competitor business monitoring & intelligence solutions. Since 2006 have scraped thousands of websites providing our clients from North America and Europe with data in formats as per their requirement. Our “hosted” web scraping services will capture the data anonymously and non-intrusively. For more details on how we can help your business, please feel free to contact us with your web data extraction project requirement and our executives will revert back to you.