Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Is Web Page Scraping the Most Ideal Method to Learn About Your Competitors?

The importance of competitor price monitoring can never be emphasized enough. Researching on the pricing structure your competition is using online is very critical to the success of your business. But how do you go about it? There are a number of ways to get these figures. Unfortunately, most of the traditional methods are time consuming and inefficient. Let’s look at why web page scraping is the most productive, efficient and reliable method to find out more about your competitor’s prices.

How much time would you require to check your competitor’s websites manually one after the other? Web scraping utilizes a different approach. Websites nowadays have a plethora of information and this makes it difficult, if not impossible, to analyze thousands of products on a single site. Furthermore, the prices change continuously and it can be difficult to keep track if you are doing this manually.

If you are checking your competitor’s pricing manually, the information you obtain can be easily lost or
Custom Web Scraping
misplaced. This method may be inexpensive but the time and effort you will spend getting this data is not worth it. The other main challenge with checking your competitor’s prices online manually is that, you may not get information on all the sellers. Even if you do, the data will be very limited so it will not be of great help to your company.

Custom web scraping provides a much better solution to learning about your competition and their prices online. To begin with, the method is not time consuming. At just a touch of a button, you can obtain accurate and reliable data regarding your competition. An online pricing intelligence tool is used to scan thousands of pages across the web and give you data you can rely on to drive your bottom-line.

In addition to that, data scraping that is done using these pricing intelligence tools can offer you very detailed information. The information can be presented in different formats depending on what you prefer best. Whether you want graphs, charts or tabled data that analyses your competitor’s prices, these tools can deliver.

Custom web scraping solutions are designed to suit your specific needs. It’s never a one size but suits all kind of approach. The results that you want to obtain from your competition will determine the kind of pricing intelligence tool that will be used in the process. These computer programs will scan different websites instantly to give you real time data which applies to the current economic situation. You would not have to rely on data that is already outdated.

Before you even invest in web scraping, know the kind of information you need in order to beat your competitors. You need to figure out the kind of data you will need to analyze from your competition in order to restructure your prices. Remember that your competition is also doing the same - monitoring your price rates. You need to do it as well and take the best approach to beat the rest.