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.

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.

Using web data scraping for financial growth

There is vast amount of data available on the Internet in various formats. A simple search would reveal too many results. If you try to implement a manual process of sieving through all of this data, imagine the time that you would spend to collate the data. Also, this may have a direct impact on the time-to-market, which will affect your timely business growth. Many business require specifically the price related information. Your business organization can utilize this price information to gain a competitive edge against your competitors.

However, all of the data available is not free of cost and some are even protected. To pose another challenge, the data that you require may be available across multiple sites and categories. If you try to collect the data manually, it would be time-consuming, error prone, and not cost-effective. Also, the data is available in different formats that may not suit your needs and make it tough for you to compare, analyse, and make the correct decision.

Your organization requires verified and specific data for regular analysis at a predetermined frequency to ensure that you are make timely decisions. These decisions will have a direct impact on your sales and revenues.

By utilizing our web scraping services, you can extract useful data from multiple sites and categories. We also provide this information in a standard format that suits your needs. Web data scraping is a way to get the price related data so that your organization gains a competitive edge over your competitors.

To be a successful organization, you need innovative ways to collect the required data and present it effectively. We at ITSYS Solutions share our expertise and experience to help you get the required data in real-time that suits your specific requirement. This also provides you with competitive price intelligence data from multiple sources with 100% accuracy to ensure that you’re among the first to know about your competitor pricing and product changes.

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.

Five Advantages Of Web Crawling For Manufacturers

The Internet, after the wheel, has been the most important invention in history of mankind. Just like all other sphere’s of our lives, it has disrupted barriers across trade & commerce and left web crawling technology and actively monitor prices of their products.

manufacturers with little or no control on the retail price of the product they manufacture. The ease of setting up an e-commerce / marketplace venture has increased retail competition and vastly improved availability and access to products across the globe. This increased retail competition has had both brick & mortar stores and online retailers slash prices often by sacrificing margins and at times selling the product below cost price. Such practices lead to negative opinion in minds of consumers as they tend to feel cheated by the manufacturer. To gain control and protect their brand, manufacturers can make use automated

An automated and managed price monitoring service will allow the manufacturer to 

1. Identify Sellers
On the Internet with marketplace model, there are thousands of sellers and it is not possible for the manufacturer to know all sellers. Our automated price monitoring solution allows the manufacturers to keep track of all sellers on multiple platforms.

2. Ensure sanctity of Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
Many a times, manufacturers define MAP and trust sellers to respect this price. Unfortunately, MAP violations happen and products are under-priced to get volumes and sales. Such situations can be tackled by having an alert system wherein manufacturers are notified on MAP violations.

3. Monitor price wars
Manufacturers need to take control of price wars as that could result in loss of trust with sellers and Price monitoring service provides manufacturers the tools to ensure a level playing amongst sellers and avoid price wars.

consumers. A rogue seller who may have dropped the price below the MAP could force other sellers to drop prices too leaving the manufacturer no way to identify when and who dropped the price first.

4. Safeguard brand value
High variation of prices, negative feedback across distribution channels or grey market activity can inflict irreversible damage on the brand value of the product. By constantly monitoring products on the various online distribution channels and feedback platforms, manufacturer can take remedial corrective action and safe guard the brand value.

5. Strengthen business relationships
Enforcement of MAP by manufacturers promotes an environment of fairness and equality thereby strengthening relationships with seller and distributor networks. Swift action on violations also helps preserve brand image, boosts credibility and increases trust.

The automated and managed price monitoring service from ITSYS Solutions allows manufacturers to keep track of their products – both price and feedback across multiple online platforms and ensuring a healthy competition amongst its sellers without affecting their credibility. All this and more benefits at just $10/day (Conditions apply). For analyzing your products catalog, schedule a free demo by visiting us at website-scraping.com

Advantages of automated Web Crawling in Competitor Price Monitoring

In today’s connected world, shopping is done at click of a button or swipe of finger. A majority of shoppers compare prices across portals before buying any product. Therefore, it is extremely important for the online retailers to keep a track of the prices of products on their competitor sites. An automated web crawling solution, the technology powering the Google search engine, can provide online businesses with prices from competitor sites in real-time boosting efficiency and bottom line.

Top 5 reasons for automated price monitoring solution

1. Stop tedious manual data search and entry work: Deploying people to search for prices of hundreds of products on multiple websites is a daunting, time-consuming & costly process prone to errors. The high cost in monitoring of prices would add to the
   
   cost and make the entire process futile. Web crawling solutions removes the need to have a team of people do the copy-paste job and provides data within hours.

2. Get a broader analysis of the market: An automated competitor site monitoring solution, allows monitoring of unlimited number of products, giving a broader analysis of the market. One can easily and anonymously get the prices of products that competitors are selling at.

3. Never miss a price change: In fast changing online world of e-commerce, having information on time is critical and is more often than the difference between making a sale or losing it to your competitor. Automated Web crawling solutions allow monitoring of products on real-time thereby providing market intelligence on competitor prices as it happens.

4. Minimize human error: Data entry is prone to errors and requires hours of multilevel checks to get 99% accuracy. Automated web crawling solutions are not only speedy but provide the same information with 100% accuracy at a fraction of the cost.

5. Focus on business: By leveraging the power of automated web crawling solutions, business owners are able to spend their time doing what they are best at – strategizing to improve bottom line by being more responsive to market changes and taking informed decisions.

To sustain in this competitive environment, keeping track of competitor prices is become essential for online retailers. Automated price monitoring service by ITSYS Solutions, anonymously captures data from targeted websites in real-time and with 100% accuracy, at a cost that allows businesses to stay competitive.