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.

Benefits of Web Scraping Services

The Internet is a huge reservoir of unlimited information. There are different tools to harness this energy of the reservoir in such a way that it is beneficial to the business and to the market in general. One of the tools used is Web Scraping. Web Scraping is a tool that is used for extracting information from different web pages and putting it together. Web Scraping is used to generate leads for the business, improved search engine optimization, reviews from the customers, the response to the product, comparing prices and other uses such as market research. There are different advantages of using web scraping services.

Advantages & Inexpensive

Talking about the small organizations, there are not enough resources that can be invested in order to collect data from different sources. Here, web scraping services come into the picture. Web scraping

services are inexpensive and do a very efficient work for the business. This helps the organization to do a very important job in a very budget-friendly manner. The data collected from different sources can be analyzed by using different software and required information can be obtained. There is a huge amount of data that can be collected at a low cost and used for market research.

Easy Implementation

Investing in a web scraping service is an investment that you will have to make only for once. Anonymous web scraping services are inexpensive on the first note and on the second, the web scraping services allow the gathering of information from all the different resources at the same time. There are different tools available which either help with gathering information from individual platforms or are involved in the analysis. This increases the cost of operation for the organization. But, while using web scraping services, these costs can be eliminated completely.

Low Maintenance and More Speed

This is one of the greatest advantages of using a web scraping service. Once the tool is installed on the system, there is not much maintenance required to run the software efficiently. There are many tools in the market that require higher processing power as the software upgrades. While using web scraping service, the processing power required remains the same and the software keeps running smoothly. Moreover, the web scraping service tools are light in nature. This means they will not slow down the system. The software will collect the information and store it without causing problems to other features of the system.

Accurate Data

It is important to have an accurate data when a market research is to be carried out. If the data is inaccurate while collection, it can lead to major risks while implementing. The processing of web scraping service is easy and fast. Although, this does not compromise the quality of data that it gathers. The data collected from different web pages is accurate and sorted. As you choose the higher versions of the web scraping tools, the data gets more filtered and better quality of the data keeps getting collected.

Conclusion

There are different advantages of using the web scraping services. There are some disadvantages too which have to be kept in mind. All in all, it is important to choose a proper web scraping service for best results.

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.

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.

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.

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.