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Data Scraping: How to Get Competitor Pricing by Price Scaping

Learn how to conduct data scraping to scrape prices from competitors’ websites. Help your business develop competitive pricing and stay ahead.

In today's highly competitive market, knowing what your competitors charge for similar products or services is essential. By understanding your competition's pricing strategies, you can make informed decisions about your pricing and stay competitive in the market.

However, manually collecting competitor prices can take time and effort. Luckily, data scraping with the right tool can help find and collect prices, and automate the process so it becomes quick and smooth. Moreover, you will also receive accurate information to make informed decisions about your pricing strategy. Before going ahead, you would need to understand the different pricing factors of competitive pricing to plan strategically and efficiently.

This blog post will discuss how to get competitor pricing using data scraping. But before that, let's clearly understand what data scraping means.  

COMPETITIVE PRICING VIA DATA SCRAPING

What is Data Scraping?  

Generally, data scraping or web scraping is the process of automatically collecting data from websites. It involves extracting data from HTML pages, parsing it, and storing it in a structured format, such as a spreadsheet or database.  

Data scraping can be conducted manually, but it's usually done using automated software tools. These tools use algorithms to extract specific data from websites, such as product information, customer reviews, or competitor pricing.  

Price Scraping  

Price scraping is a process that focuses on extracting competitor prices from websites and online platforms. Similar to general data scraping, you can scrape prices using pricing platforms.  

While you can gather this information manually, businesses prefer using an automated tool to collect, store in an organised structure and analyse the data. This process significantly reduces the time and bandwidth required when done otherwise.  

Now, let's look at why data scraping is essential for business.  

COMPETITIVE PRICING IMPORTANCE

Why is Data Scraping Important?  

Scraping data is crucial as it lets you get ample information through a streamlined process. It saves managers time and resources compared to manually collecting data, and it can provide you with insights that would be difficult to obtain otherwise.  

Moreover, leveraging this information to set optimal prices helps you gain a competitive edge and attain maximum revenue. Click on this link to learn the advantages of competitive pricing for B2B companies.

Let's take a closer look at why scraping data is essential. For example, data scraping can be used to:  

  • Monitor competitor pricing  
  • Collect customer reviews and feedback  
  • Track social media mentions of your brand  
  • Extract data for market research and analysis  
  • Gather data for academic or scientific research  

HOW TO GET COMPETITOR PRICING

How to Get Competitor Pricing using Data Scraping?  

You can scrape data from the website manually using specific programming languages. However, due to today's fast-paced business executions, you can scrape prices using ready-made software tools to extract data from websites.  

Here's how to scrape data from a website in general:  

  • Identify the website you want to check and the data you want to collect.  
  • Use a scraping tool to extract data from the website.  
  • Parse the data to extract the specific information you need.  
  • Store the data in a structured format, such as a CSV file or database.  

Data scraping can be done using a variety of programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. Moreover, many scraping tools also have user interfaces that allow non-technical users to scrape data without writing code.  

Now, let's look at a strategic method on how to find competitor pricing.  

HOW TO SCRAPE COMPETITOR PRICES

How to Scrape Prices from Competitors' Websites and Online Platforms?

This section discusses how to find competitor pricing and other metrics to start an analysis. In short, you'd have to identify your direct competitors and then understand the metrics you need. You also need to place your objective in gathering this information and how you can implement it in your pricing strategy. Next, let's look at how to scrape data from a website to maintain competitive pricing.  

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors  

Before you can start scraping competitor pricing data, you need to identify who your competitors are. First, list all the companies that offer similar products or services to yours. You can use search engines or industry directories to find them.  

You can categorise your competitors in three ways: primary, secondary and tertiary. Once you’ve done that, you can focus on the direct competitors to determine your immediate pricing decisions. Head to our competitive pricing analysis blog to learn more about categorizing competitors.  

Step 2: Determine the Data You Want to Collect  

Once you have identified your competitors, you must determine the data you want to collect. Of course, pricing is the most critical data to manage, but you may also want to collect other data, such as product descriptions, customer reviews, and shipping costs.  

You can scrape all your competitors' prices and record them in a structured system. For a comprehensive analysis, you may want to gather the following:  

  • Price index  
  • Product availability  
  • Competitor's additional offers  

To understand better, you can go to our competitive pricing analysis blog for more information.  

Step 3: Choose a Data Scraping Tool  

In this step, you can scrape data from websites. But, instead of scraping prices manually, you should use a price scrapping tool to do the work for you. These data scraping tools extract various data types from websites and are not limited to just prices.  

Of the many data scraping tools, some popular ones include Scrapy, Beautiful Soup, and Selenium. These tools allow you to extract data from websites and store it in a structured format like Excel or Google Sheets for organised storage.  

Step 4: Create Your Data Scraping Script  

Once you have chosen a data scraping tool, you need to create a scraping script. Your scraping script should include the URLs of the websites you want to scrape, the data you wish to collect, and any rules you want to apply to the scraping process.  

Step 5: Run Your Data Scraping Script  

Once you have created your scraping script, you need to run it. The scraping process can take some time, depending on the number of websites you are scraping and the amount of data you are collecting.  

Step 6: Analyse Your Scraped Data  

After the data scraping process is complete, you need to analyse the data you have collected. You can use tools such as Excel or Python to analyse the data and identify trends in your competitors' pricing strategies.  

Step 7: Make Informed Decisions About Your Pricing Strategy  

Finally, you can use your collected data to make informed decisions about your pricing strategy. By understanding your competitors' pricing strategies, you can set your prices at a competitive and profitable level.  

Now that you understand how to get competitor pricing through price scraping let's look at a more efficient and sustainable alternative for the longer term. That is the use of AI and ML-driven pricing platforms. Such price scrapping tools leverage mature datasets, macro conditions, and market trends to recommend prices.  

HOW AI HELPS GAIN COMPETITOR PRICING

Use an AI-Driven Pricing Platform to Scrape, Analyse Data and More  

Pricing platforms that use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning do much more than scrape data from websites. Using API, platforms like SYMSON can help you get data from online eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Google Shopping and other websites.  Such competitive pricing platforms help assemble data and present it in an organized manner for more straightforward analysis. It helps managers visualise the data and draw insights more seamlessly.

Moreover, SYMSON also leverages it into complex calculations, considering multiple factors, to generate recommendations for price changes. Furthermore, SYMSON can even automatically adjust the prices if so desired.

Pricing Software Recommends Optimal Competitive Prices  

You receive optimal price recommendations where you can add your own business rules for healthy profits and not lose margins. You can even apply other business rules so your goals align with the platform’s optimisation. Such tools study the macro scenario of the market like geographical, climate context, etc. They also consider the current economic case while developing prices.

Moreover, platforms like SYMSON enable you to use various pricing strategies that best fit your business goals. If you want to stay prepared for the future, you can set scenarios and run future predictions! Its intelligent algorithm continues to study the market and current condition and automatically reacts to changes, thereby suggesting the best prices.

Better yet, you can clearly understand the logic behind each recommendation as SYMSON uses explainable AI. Read more on how to implement competitive pricing in SYMSON for a clear understanding.

 

Conclusion  

Data scraping can be an effective way to collect competitor pricing data quickly and efficiently. Following the steps outlined in this blog post, you can use data scraping to gain a competitive advantage in the market. However, it's important to remember that data scraping must be done ethically and legally. Always obtain permission before scraping data from a website, and ensure you are not violating any laws or regulations.  

Do you want a free demo to try how SYMSON can help your business with margin improvement or pricing management? Do you want to learn more? Schedule a call with a consultant and book a 20 minute brainstorm session!

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HAVE A QUESTION?

Frequently Asked
Questions

Data Scraping

1. What is Data Scraping?

Data scraping is extracting information and data from websites using automated software. Here's how to scrape data from a website: it involves writing a program or script to crawl through web pages, extract the relevant data, and store it in a structured format for further analysis or use.  

Moreover, businesses use data scraping to extract various data types from websites, including text, images, links, and more. It is commonly used in multiple industries, such as market research, e-commerce, social media, etc.  

Businesses leverage data scrapping to gain information about their competitors- mostly their product prices. Knowing the costs and their products helps companies position themselves accordingly and price competitively.  

However, it is essential to note that data scraping may raise legal and ethical concerns if the data is copyrighted or if the website explicitly prohibits web scraping. Therefore, checking the website's terms of service before engaging in any price scraping activities is essential.  

2. What is Price Scrapping?

Price scraping, also known as price monitoring or tracking, is collecting pricing data from various sources, such as eCommerce websites, marketplaces, and other online platforms. The collected data is then analysed to gain insights into price trends, competitor pricing, and market dynamics.  

Price scraping typically uses web scraping tools and techniques to extract pricing data automatically from relevant sources. The data collected may include product prices, discounts, shipping costs, and other pricing-related information.  

Businesses commonly use price scraping to track their prices, monitor competitor pricing, and make pricing decisions based on market trends. For example, an eCommerce retailer may use price scraping to monitor their competitors' prices and adjust their prices accordingly to stay competitive.  

3. How to scrape prices from eCommerce websites?

Here's how to get competitor pricing from different websites. You can conduct it manually or use web scraping techniques. Let's have a closer look:  

  • Identify the websites you want to scrape for competitor pricing information.  
  • Choose a web scraping tool or software. Many options are available, both free and paid, such as Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and more.  
  • Write or customise a web scraper to extract the relevant pricing data. This involves identifying the HTML tags and attributes that contain the pricing information and writing code to draw and store it.  
  • Run the web scraper on each website to collect the pricing data. You can save the data in a structured format like a CSV or Excel file.  
  • Analyse and compare the data to gain insights into competitor pricing trends.  
  • Leverage a dedicated pricing management software to collect competitor prices automatically, and analyse the same and the market to set AI-driven price recommendations.

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