The Perks of Web Scraping for Price Intelligence
Web scraping can uncover plenty of insights and secrets. We know it, and we’ve been doing it for so long that it’s almost impossible to not be aware of every little use it has.
We customize and use web scrapers to solve different problems that our customers might have, and today, we are going to explain the web scraping process for businesses and entrepreneurs that use it for price and product intelligence.
This topic should be on the “to read” list for everyone who wants to grow a business in domains like e-commerce, retail, product marketing, or almost anything related to selling products or services.
So stay tuned. You found the gold mine!
What is price intelligence, and why is it important
Scraping data from public websites to gain information about competitors and their products is more and more common practice in the business world.
Being on top with the latest changes regarding prices and product information, like available stocks or product descriptions, offers a more extensive overview of the market and impacts the decision-making process. Also, by using extracted data, you can ensure business growth and continuity by automating your pricing strategies and market positioning.
Frequent uses of web scraping tools in price intelligence include:
- dynamic pricing
- revenue optimization
- competitor monitoring
- product trend monitoring
- brand and MAP (minimum advertised price) compliance
Using a web data scraping tool like WebScrapingAPI, you will no longer have to stalk competitors’ websites every day and see what they’re charging. You can stop copy and pasting info into a document, and so on. It’s a tedious and time-consuming task.
On the positive side, you can create an instance of the scraper and start creating your own price database without the inconvenience of manually writing everything down.
Let us show you how!
How to use WebScrapingAPI for price intelligence
Step 1:
Enter the WebScrapingAPI website and create an account. This will give you access to 1000 free API calls. Using them, you have the chance to test our product and see if it solves your needs. By the way, we are pretty sure WebScrapingAPI can solve anything, but your opinion matters for us. That’s why you get to try it first, before putting any money in.
After creating your account and receive your free API calls, you’re ready to start your web scraping adventure.
Our suggestion is to prepare a list of all the website pages you want to scrape before actually doing it so that everything goes smooth and fast and you receive the data in no time.
Step 2:
To use WebScrapingAPI for price intelligence, having that list with all your competitors’ products you are interested in is crucial. After that, all you have to do is scrape the wanted web pages and access data quickly and without any effort.
Another great thing when it comes to knowledge about pricing while using WebScrapingAPI: you get to test out the API in the playground and compare results using different parameters and websites. This can help you visualize the outcome and how helpful the API really is! Everything you need to know for your business is right in front of you.
Step 3:
Basically, after you used WebScrapingAPI to extract the website’s data, you have to parse the HTML result, filter each product and store its price information in the desired format, or use it in any way you like based on your needs. This way, data is easily accessible, ready for you to analyze so that you can make fast decisions about products.
Essential aspects to consider
WebScrapingAPI can be easily integrated into your project with the documentation’s help, which is a developer’s manual of said API. There you will see how to do it in different programming languages and how the parameters are used efficiently.
All these are available because we believe that every client should get the power to customize the product the way they want to, based on their needs and problems they want to solve.
And talking about customization and making life easier. Prices and values tend to change faster than expected. In this way, competitors make sure that it’s harder for you to follow. Little do they know that by using web scraping, you are always one step ahead.
If your coding skills are sharp, you can create an instance of web scraping that will scrape by itself the set web pages at the time you want.
Let’s say you need the scraper to look on wanted web pages every day around noon. You can do that with a few code lines. You can schedule the web scraper to watch your competitors whenever you think is best, based on what you know about them. Amazing, right?
This way, you make sure you always have the latest data available and you can adjust your products’ prices and strategy based on factual information from the market.
As already shown, web scraping can be used as a solution for a suite of problems that can be found in any industry.
Adjusting prices so that you can be competitive on the market is one crucial thing when talking about businesses and their potential to grow and be successful. Luckily, there is technology and tools like WebScrapingAPI that help with this, doing all the boring work so that you can focus on what matters most: planning and strategizing.
To learn more about when web scraping comes in hand and in which cases it brings the most value, access our latest articles:
