API Scraping for Competitive Pricing Intelligence
Retail price intelligence can make or break your company if you don’t have access to it. A variety of niche-specific, e-commerce stores are all vying for the top spot among online shoppers, competing against giant online retailers and chain stores.
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Staying afloat in such a market means getting ahead of the competition. A majority of companies that have managed to do so over the years use competitive pricing intelligence to keep up with changing trends as well as the ebb and flow of demand.
Why Your Competitors’ Pricing Intelligence Is Important
Knowing what your rivals are up to is key. When you analyze your competitors’ pricing intelligence, you can:
- Offer peak sales
- Draw in new customers
Competitive pricing intelligence is a process where you monitor the prices your rivals are setting and how these prices fluctuate in the market. This data ranges from various promotions to trending retail items and allows you to adjust your pricing decision based on research-based data.
Furthermore, it gives you a competitive edge across your niche market, which can be ever-changing. In sales, there are so many unknown factors that can spring up and affect how your business operates, be it natural disasters, politics, or the mood of your consumer base. Using price intelligence data with real-time trend access allows you to quickly shift into new market areas.
Gathering price intelligence data used to be much more challenging, requiring that you scour the web or catalogs for price ranges other similar stores were using as well as promotions they were running. It’d take hours to punch numbers into a spreadsheet only to discover that the trends might have changed before finishing the work.
Technology has made all that much more efficient, saving a vast amount of time — a valuable resource in its own right that can be better served elsewhere within your company. Nowadays, you can gather pricing intelligence by scraping the web. Web scraping software harnesses the power of computer bots to do the scouring for you. The bots excavate websites, keywords, or categories you want data on and compile the results for you to review at the most convenient time. With a few clicks of a button, you can have all the data you will ever need for your business.
The Value of Online Price Intelligence
As we already mentioned, competitive pricing intelligence is valuable. And there are many fantastic things you can do with it.
When you have access to the pricing data of your competitors and have tracked it through a few years, for instance, you will be able to analyze various patterns and predict what their future prices may be for upcoming seasons. By anticipating their future price points, you can do things like promote them or go with a lower price.
The ability to predict the future prices set by your competitors is not the only benefit to collecting pricing intelligence. You can also:
- Shift your strategy if something goes wrong.
- Better plan out your promotions for the most effective ROI while still competing on the market with the other products.
- Align your prices and sales to fit your company’s roadmap by analyzing other proven successful companies.
Online pricing intelligence has many benefits to retail companies, but it’s easy to overlook web scraping as an option because of the presumed difficulty of gathering something so valuable. Fortunately, web scraping can be cost-effective and easy to use.
How To Use Web Scraping for Real-Time Price Monitoring
You can use web scraping to find the highest-quality information in real-time. You don’t have to rely on old data sets or even need employees to perform online scraping for you so you can keep up with pricing trends. With the power of scraping API, you can set it up automatically and only receive the data you want.
High-quality data can help your business thrive. Data is available for your goals, whether it’s sticking to the roadmap or fast-tracking it to success quicker than you anticipated. With a real-time web scraping bot, you can achieve it.
A variety of data points are beneficial to the retail industry when scraping the web. They include:
- Pricing trends
- Consumer shopping trends
- Competitor price changes
- The interests of those visiting your store
- The interests of those visiting competitor’s store
Web scraping is such an indispensable tool for real-time price monitoring, especially when looking at competitor prices. Though the previous data points are essential, companies can create a bundle of plans based on monitoring competitors’ prices and watching their trends and promotions.
For instance, you can analyze successful businesses within your niche to see their pricing sweet spots for products. You can also see when they throw promotional sales and explore why.
Furthermore, by analyzing competitor pricing within the niche retail, you can make wiser product investment decisions because you already know what’s trending and what sells. These have to be a spur-of-the-moment decision in some niches because the industry is fast-paced and ever-changing. Having real-time data to work with to see what products are trending can help you achieve business success.
Examples of real-time scraping data
Whether you’re scraping for an online retailer, sales, or strictly e-commerce, you have the option of getting a variety of data points and information about your competitors and your audience.
Data scraping will allow you to see what you’re up against and understand who your target audience is for marketing purposes. Real-time scraping data consists of:
- Purchases via e-commerce sites
- Referral traffic to your site or competitor sites
- Visitor engagement stats, like the length of site use and pages browsed before leaving
- The ability to monitor prices in real time
You can utilize these data points to analyze essential details, like:
- Customer stats, which can be used to develop a target customer persona over time
- Referral traffic, which can give you key insights into what attracts customers to your store.
- Customer acquisition, which can help you draw in more customers while lowering the cost of advertising.
You can also use this information to analyze why customers return to your store. Are you selling a product or providing a service that outshines your competitors? You might — and pricing intelligence can tell you that.
Once you have the data, consider focusing on customer lifetime value research. Forming relationships with customers helps to keep them shopping at your store, and this data point will let you know just how good you’re doing at that.
Finally, try to determine what it takes to keep your loyal shoppers coming back for more. A clear view of customer loyalty and retention allows you to manipulate marketing strategies that work best for your business, and this can save you the most money in the long run.
Web Scraping APIs Offer Real-Time Price Intelligence Data
Mass quantities of real-time competitive pricing intelligence data would be impossible to come by if it weren’t for API scrapers. API scraping technology consists of easy-to-use bots that gather data when you need it most.
With traditional web scraping, you have to find your website and manually paste it into a web scraper any time you want a data set. This process requires someone to work with data retrieval in a more hands-on way, though never as hands-on as if you had no scraper at all.
Scraping APR is a fast, automated process that gives you current trends as results. The API just has to be set up once. When you choose the site you want to scrape, you can have the API bots scrape it at timed intervals and update your database. As an example, if you set the bots to scrape every 36 hours, you’ll have your database updated frequently as well as access to real-time trends.
Finally, you get massive amounts of data when using an API scraper. This data is easy to download into your database, which you can later use to locate the latest trends.
The lack of data decay is the top advantage of continually updating data while using an API instead of a traditional web scraper. If you’re working with a web scraper that gives you an un-updated set of data overall, then your data will soon be useless, especially in the fast-paced digital world of retail sales.
With Scraper Bot API, you can have your data in as little as 60 seconds.
Steps for scraping with API
Scraping Robot is so efficient, it only requires a few simple steps to operate. Interested in trying it? If so, all you have to do is:
- Copy the link to the site you want to scrape.
- Open up the online Scraping Robot API page.
- Copy the link from your site into the box.
- Press the run button, and in around 60 seconds, you will have an HTML version of your data.
- Download the HTML version of the data into a program or spreadsheet to begin working with it.
Scraping Robot is a comprehensive API software to collect pricing data for your business and help you gain a more extensive customers base.
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