How Price Scraping (And Price Scrapers) Help Sellers
Over the past year, I’ve started taking photos on 35mm film. Interested in photography all my life, taking photos is a way of documenting my experiences and expressing myself. Because of how expensive shooting and printing on film is, I am always on the lookout for a local photo developer with a reasonable price. When my friend told me of a cheap place a few blocks away, I rushed to drop off my latest roll. However, upon receiving my truthfully disappointing scans, I found the more expensive developers to be worth the price. Just like me, consumers each day try to find the perfect balance between a low price and high-quality product or service.
While price is not the most important factor for everyone, giving consumers great value is an easy way to attract potential clients and keep recurring ones. When deciding the perfect price, it is crucial to factor in the price of the competition. If you can find a way to have a lower price than your main competitors, then you are going to jump ahead of them in no time. Price scraping is the extraction of pricing information from web pages. This process is used to help businesses set a price that covers their costs without excluding them from the competition. By scraping prices, your business will gain tons of new customers once you find the sweet spot. If you already know the basics of price scraping, use the table of contents to navigate the article and learn about the best price scraping tools.
Table of Contents
What is Price Scraping?
Web scraping is the use of software to extract public data from web pages. First, the scraper accesses a given page in the same way your browser does. Then, it parses the information and pulls out whatever relevant data you’re looking for. Finally, it exports that data to a format of your choosing – usually some kind of spreadsheet. Price scraping, then, is a subset of web scraping used specifically to scrape prices from specific eCommerce pages.
Who can benefit from price scraping?
For sellers with lots of competition, price scraping is essential to finding the perfect price point that will attract customers and earn you a profit. Amazon has trained us all to search for the cheapest bargain available, and when you can see all products in a given category at a glance, price is going to be the first thing that sets them apart. And you don’t have to just take our word for it – according to a survey of 3000 American consumers conducted by BigCommerce, 87% of eCommerce customers see prices as the top purchasing factor while shopping online.
How to Use a Price Scraper Tool
When you scrape prices, it is easy to just try and lower your price as much as possible. But first analyzing the competition and understanding your pricing goals helps you get more out of the price scraping process. Below are tips on how to best use a price scraper tool.
Identify competition
This is the step that no tool or piece of software can do for you: deciding what pages you need to scrape, and why. Working with the Scraping Robot team, we provide valuable insights about how to implement data into your current business model or however you operate in a given industry. All sellers, no matter how small, need a strong understanding of the competitors they’re going up against. You probably already know that you should be price scraping people who are offering products similar to yours on your platform of choice.
But are you looking at other platforms? According to the same BigCommerce survey, more than 86% of online consumers compare prices on multiple eCommerce platforms before making a purchase. Consider looking at competitors who might not be selling the same products as you, but who are selling to the same group of customers.
Think about Blockbuster and Netflix. They were both offering very different services – one offered in-store and online physical media rental, while the other streamed digital media to a web-connected device – but both were targeting the same need in their consumers: a desire to be conveniently and inexpensively entertained. Eventually, as we all know, Netflix killed Blockbuster and much of the physical media landscape with it.
Scrape relevant information
Once you’ve identified the competition, find any and all URLs where they’re selling a product that competes with yours. Once you’ve selected a particular price scraping tool (which we’ll cover in the next section of this article), you should be able to just enter those URLs into some kind of input field and get price data in minutes. Some software allows you to put in a product number, like an SKU or an ASIN, rather than a URL. This can be good because it means that if the seller changes the URL of their product (which happens a lot on certain eCommerce sites), you’re still targeting the right page.
Export and analyze
Before analyzing your data, you must properly export it. Lots of scraping tools export data in a way that is not easy to read (JSON or XML files) that require a parser. Scrapers that export through an Excel of CSV are much easier to read. If your scraper does the former, then exporting the information in a way that makes sense is essential to helping your employees understand the data, even those in departments that don’t require data literacy. The main goal of price scraping software is to help you analyze your pricing compared to the competition. Taking the time to glean insights, helps you make tough decisions regarding cost. You must use proper insights to discover how to lower your price as much as possible without losing profit or diminishing the quality of the product. Insights revealed by data can be used to tailor your price to the right audience and change it based on continually collected data without diminishing the quality of the product.
The Best Price Scraping Software
At Scraping Robot, we truly believe that we offer the best free price scraping tool for individual sellers, small businesses, and anyone else who needs high-quality price scraping at a low cost. We offer 5000 free scrapes before you even have to pay a cent. And if your scraping needs are such that you do need to pay more, our unique partnerships and streamlined process allow us to offer the lowest industry price of only $0.0009 cents a scrape. Plus, we’re more than just a price checker tool. We already offer stock availability data in addition to every price scrape. And if you ever need a feature we don’t offer, just reach out to us and our team of expert devs will build it for you in no time. Get started today with 5000 free scrapes or try a free demo and see if scraping is the right fit for your project.
Scrape Prices with Scraping Robot
Below are a few ways you can use Scraping Robot for your various scraping needs.
eCommerce
eCommerce sites are great sources of pricing data, especially for online sellers. On these sites, you can easily see comparative prices for a given product. By scraping these sites, you can access competitor price information and also see product data and reviews that give insights into the reasoning for the price (material costs) as well as how the price is perceived by buyers. As mentioned above, it is crucial that you check multiple eCommerce platforms since consumers compare across platforms often before making a purchase.
Customer sentiment data
Scraping social media sites and product reviews helps you understand how consumers feel about a given price point. With reviews, it is clear whether a price is too high for a product or whether customers are happy to pay it for the quality they receive. On social media, you can see which product accounts are highly followed as well as the accounts of specific customers.
Custom scraping solution
If you have a unique set of needs when it comes to extracting pricing data, a custom scraping solution might be for you. With a custom solution, you work alongside Scraping Robot’s team to develop a scraper that fulfills your data needs. Additionally, a custom solution includes the knowledge of Scraping Robot’s team regarding security and the management and development of proxies. With our team helping you out, you will spend less time collecting data and more time analyzing and learning from it. If this seems like a good fit for your project, contact us to get started.
Conclusion
Sometimes it can feel impossible to stand out and make a living on increasingly overcrowded eCommerce platforms. But taking your seller or reseller operation to the next level isn’t as hard as you might think! Remember: novices watch their own board, masters watch their opponent’s board. Thanks to Scraping Robot, watching those boards just got a whole lot easier and a whole lot less expensive. But even if you choose to go with another tool for price scraping, we hope you’ve found this article informative and helpful as you prepare to take your company to the next step with insights gleaned from price scraping.
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