Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Capture Store Locations Data Easily

Are you spending lot of time to manually capture & monitor the retail store locations of your competition? Scraping the data from the web can get the work done in a shorter time allowing you to
get a strategic view of how many stores they have nationally, regionally or in particular cities and take informed decisions for locating your new stores.

Web scraping in its simplest form is described as the process of collecting information from the web automatically. Web scraper software can quickly extract data or information from the targeted website when needed. Web scraping programs work by embedding specific known browsers such as Mozilla and/ or Internet Explorer, or implementing a smaller degree of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Web Scraping involves browsing the web in an automated, orderly and methodical manner and save required contents in a tabular form in Microsoft word, PowerPoint, Excel, MySQL or any other database format.

We have scraped hundreds of US & Canadian retail chain websites / branches (such as Jeweler chains, Mobile stores, Autoparts /Tire shops, Gas Stations, Bank branches, Insurance company branches, ATM locations) for their store locations and captured details like Store Name, Address, City, State, Zip/Postal Code, Phone Number, Store Hours, Facilities/Amenities offered, Latitude Longitude and provided the formatted data to our clients in Microsoft Excel.

For your project, you just need to contact us specifying the retail chain website(s), the geographical areas for which data is needed (eg. selected cities or states, or all states and cities in the country) and fields of information. We will write and run the scrapers on our own servers that will with 100% accuracy, reliably, efficiently and anonymously, capture the details and provide them to you in Excel.

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

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.

Take the right action to maximize margin

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.

David Hart, 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.