How Price Monitoring Can Benefit Your Online Store

Competitor price monitoring can help you react quickly to shifts in pricing and prevent losses. It can help you drive more sales to your online store since you are able to avoid overpricing products. But a few online store owners are taking advantage of price monitoring. What they don’t know is that they may be selling their products too cheaply and getting a narrower margin that their market allows. So if you just set up an online store, the first thing you need to consider is to track competitor prices. Here’s why.

Take advantage of opportunities

Take the right action to maximize margin Some of the most successful online stores are using competitor price monitoring to spot opportunities and take advantage of them to boost sales. When you collect the data and analyze it, you’ll be able to identify certain trends and get points across your market which you didn’t know existed. Tracking competitor prices also allows you to know exactly where your business is positioned and make measures to move a step ahead.

The process of price monitoring gives you data you can rely on to make very important decisions that influence the success of your online store. You can act knowing that you have credible data to support your decisions. In fact, it reduces the risks your business is taking because you are relying on information that is credible to try and maximize margins and expand your offers.

Monitor markets

How else would you know what’s going on in your industry if you don’t monitor your competitors? You need to be alerted on the trends as they happen. Sometimes this information is no longer useful if it is not known immediately. You’ll need a service that can monitor competitor pricing, products and perceptions online round the clock so you don’t miss out on anything.

Spend less time watching your competitors

When you have a system that tracks competitor prices all through, you don’t need to spend time watching their websites manually. It’s impossible to go through hundreds of product pages looking for promotions and discounts offered by your competitors. You can get it done within a few minutes and spend the rest of your time devising a pricing strategy that will work for your business.

Maximize profit margins

Most online stores that fail to reach the desired level of success failed to come up with a suitable pricing strategy. You need tangible information to develop a pricing model that works for your industry and brand. If you go so high, you risk becoming uncommunicative and losing out on customers who simply can’t afford your product or service. On the other hand, if you go too low to the extent that you become unprofitable, your online store can face serious losses that lead to closure. To avoid all these, monitor competitor prices round the clock and always know what’s happening in your industry. Get reports on latest price changes and trends so you know exactly what your competitor is doing and react accordingly.

ITSYS Solutions, has scraped over thousands of websites providing our clients from North America and Europe with data in formats as per their requirement, providing web scraping, business intelligence information, competitive price intelligence, retail business outlet locations, product catalogs, etc.

ITSYS Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Compliance & Risk Management

The above terms may seem heavy to understand but play a crucial role in a companies growth and success. So let us understand what these spheres deal with -

Risk management

It refers to the processes with the help of which the management / the organization can identify, analyze, and where ever necessary, respond appropriately to the anticipated risks, which may adversely affect and obstruct the path of realization of the organization's business objectives. The response to risks typically depends on their perceived gravity/ intensity of the problem, and involves controlling it, avoiding it, accepting it and moving accordingly or transferring it to a third party for it to be handled appropriately.

Most of the organizations and / or business groups routinely manage a variety of risks - be it technological risks, commercial/financial risks, information security risks, privacy risks, R&D risks or be it external legal and regulatory compliance risks. All of these if taken care and handled on time appropriately can help boost a company growth graph drastically and if not, then can lead to a rapid downfall too.

Compliance
It caters to adhering to the stated requirements, which at the organizational level, is often achieved through management processes identifying the applicable requirements - laws, regulations, contracts, strategies and policies, assessing the state of compliance, anticipating/determining the risks and loop holes and evaluating the potential costs, thence prioritizing, funding and initiating any corrective actions deemed necessary.

Media Scraping and monitoring for Broadcast Media

Media scraping is an extremely popular tool used primarily for the extraction of data from various social media sites as wells as blogs and news sites. The most important social media sites that are used for this very purpose are Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snap chat and LinkedIn. These are social media platforms where the majority of the public choose to share most of their private delights and opinions. Through numerous posts of different individuals in the public media scraping which is also known as social media scraping is able to derive data that ultimately aids in revealing and further understanding of various human behaviors, attitudes and habits. This particular information help to determine data about various consumption habit of the public which helps organizations, individuals, media to understand how their content is being consumed, who are its most enthusiastic consumers and also they can improve their content.

Broadcast media is a group of media focused on producing entertaining as well as political and relevant contents. The success of broadcast media chiefly depends on audience reaction. What the audience thinks and wants influences the work of this group. Broadcast media traditionally includes television and radio but now also includes certain digital media platforms. The broadcast of different kinds of new totally depends on how the audience. For example the evenings are mostly reserved for the relaying of the most topical news and discussions around the world because that is the time when majority of the working population returns home and switches on the television or the radio. It also depends on who is watching what kind of content. Indian television serials mostly portray traditional Indian domestic scenes as housewives and old people are most likely to sit around the television and while away their time watching these contents.

Media scraping is extremely essential for the broadcast Medias.

The different ways in which media scraping monitors for the broadcast media are as follows –

• The media scraping helps in determining the kind of content the audience is craving. By this the broadcast media is inspired to create content centering those topics. What the audience wants is crucial for the success and effect of the broadcast media.
• The media scraping helps in assessing how satisfied the audience is with the present content. This aspect is also very important as this helps the broadcast company to understand the quality of content they are producing and how effective and impact they are.
• Another crucial data that media scraping extracts is what the present content is lacking. This lack helps immensely in the determining of what more needs to be included in the future content.
• The data also helps in understanding what kind of platform the audience prefers while consuming content – digital or traditional media
• Media scraping also helps immensely in figuring on which days, at what part of those days a certain kind of content is likely to be consumed. Another crucial data that media scraping reveals is the amount of time the audience devotes to those contents.

The collaboration of media scraping and broadcast media is extremely crucial and critical.

Techniques of web scraping you should know

It’s a process of extraction of data from various websites. It’s a variant of data scraping. The data extracted is then used for analysis. Web scraping involves fetching a web page and then extracting the data from it. Web scraping is used to understand the trend of the market, to understand your competitors and their pricing and then get ahead of them. Web scrapers typically take something from webpage and then use it for other purposes. The data may be parsed, reformatted or put in a spreadsheet etc.

Techniques of web scraping

Web scraping is the process of automatically collecting information from the World Wide Web. Following are some of the best web scraping techniques that can be used for collecting information: –

• Human copy and paste – Sometimes a better technology than any ever created. Usually websites don’t want their data to be scraped. For these sites, human touch can do the trick.
• Text pattern matching – It’s a very simple yet powerful approach. It’s based on UNIX grep command or regular expression matching facilities of programming languages.
• HTTP programming – HTTP requests can be posted to the web server to retrieve static and dynamic web pages.
• HTML parsing – websites generally have a large collection of pages generated dynamically. Same category data are usually encoded into similar pages by a common script or template. To parse HTML pages, languages like HTQL and XQuery can be used.
• Dom parsing – by embedding a full-fledged browser, programs can retrieve the dynamic content generated by client-side scripts.
• Semantic annotation recognizing – the pages being scraped may embrace semantic mark-ups and annotations. These can be used to locate specific data snippets.

Conclusion

Web data scraping in modern times has advanced the internet usage, marketing and management to a whole new dimension. The job which demanded days can be finished within few seconds. Extensively used in marketing and artificial intelligence analysis it’s importance cannot be ignored.