In the coming years, e-commerce will continue to grow as an industry that has experienced rapid growth in the past few years. The number of e-commerce sites worldwide is estimated between 12 million and 24 million, and a new one is created every day. The most important thing for startups in the e-commerce space is to ensure that they have a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace, and price scraping helps with that.
What is price scraping
The process of price scraping consists of using a bot or web crawler in order to obtain pricing information from a website by using a bot or crawler in order to scrape that website. You can use web scraping software for searching, finding, and copying data from websites, which can then be used for further analysis. This process is useful in order to track the prices of competitive products on websites as well as to collect data on the products themselves.
By mimicking the behavior of a real-life web user, price scraping software gathers data from a competitor’s website by simulating the behavior of the actual user. As a result, price scraping has become one of the most critical ways online retailers have to succeed in the market by being able to have near-real-time visibility into their prices and stock availability.
Using Price Scrapers To Increase Profits In E-commerce
Identify Your Competitors
The first step in using a price scraper is to identify competitors, where you can then find out who your competitors are. In order to achieve this, you need to identify other e-commerce websites or brands that are directly competing with yours and that are selling similar or even the same types of products as you do. In addition, consider companies that provide substitute products, which, while they may be different, can replace your own if your purchasing patterns change, such as butter and margarine. Following the identification of competitors, the domains of those competitors will be introduced to the tracking software so that data can be extracted.
Extract Relevant Information
By using price scrapers, you can get daily information on prices, promotions, and stock levels of your competitors, from anywhere in the world. Additionally, they gather information about a competitor’s prices on price comparison websites such as Google Shopping, as well as marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. The competitors also have the ability to extract shipping costs and lead times from each of these sales channels.
Business can generate a price history using powerful price scrapers that can provide insight into how their competitors react to changes in demand and user trends, as well as how they adjust their prices according to the season.
Analysis and Export of Data
In order to speed up and optimise decision-making, the e-commerce business will be presented with the collected data in a simple, straightforward way. Additionally, by combining tables and interactive graphs, any data relevant to the strategic decision-making process can readily be assessed, starting with competitor gross margins, to how dynamic pricing is applied to their products and services.
In addition, some advanced price scrapers include the ability to export data in various formats, which can be used for both internal presentations within a company as well as external studies.
A price scrape is a method Minderest uses to gather information about products, prices, and stock availability. E-commerce businesses can take advantage of this tool to improve the management of pricing strategies and adapt to market changes at any time. Due to the increasing speed with which the online market is expanding, so many new online stores are opening every day. You need to hire a team of price experts who can help you monitor your competitors based on your company’s characteristics and objectives if you want to have a successful e-commerce business.
What Is The Purpose Of Scraping Prices For E-commerce Startups?
Start-ups in the e-commerce sector that strive for growth will gain much from being embraced by sufficient information. Providing information that is both helpful and not misleading is one of the most important requisites for their advancement.
How do we prioritize the vast amounts of information available? The price of the product is obviously the most important factor. An e-commerce startup must factor the competition into its pricing decision in order to determine the perfect price. In most cases, if you can provide them with a lower price than they are currently offering, you will be able to overtake your main competitors.
Startups in the e-commerce space can establish a price that covers their costs without being cut out of the competition thanks to price scraping. In today’s increasingly digital-first world, it is possible to prevent e-commerce startups from facing some serious challenges, such as losing customers.
Keeping An Eye On Prices
The user experience is extremely important for e-commerce sites to retain their existing customers over time, while the price is the decisive factor for first-time buyers. Price scraping helps you find a price that will attract customers and make you a profit when you have a lot of competition for your products. It is obvious that due to the rapid changes in the market, the perfect point for a price, will not likely be fixed at this stage, highlighting the importance of price monitoring as a result.
For e-commerce startups, scraping prices is a great way to track and monitor prices from retailers, competitors, and third-party vendors. Through the establishment of a price monitoring process, startups will be able to take effective measures to keep the prices of their brand competitive and stable, as well as prevent price wars by monitoring the price of their brand. Additionally, the scraped prices enable startups to design a pricing strategy based on those scraped prices at any given time and then adjust it in accordance with how the scraped prices have changed.
Market Research
A successful e-commerce site needs to conduct market research to survive the fierce competition in the e-commerce industry. Furthermore, not only can these startups construct large, custom datasets, they can also do so at a very low cost, which provides a good foundation for the analysis they conduct later.
Market research is conducted by entrepreneurs to determine what their customers want from e-commerce websites. There are many ways to provide sellers with a full selection of quantitative and qualitative information about why a typical customer might choose to buy the good. Prices are very important in determining whether an ideal customer will purchase the good. In terms of the advantages of price scraping for startups, we can point out that they are more likely to get a better understanding of why some prices are more acceptable than others.
Both science and intuition can be applied to market research. Depending on your data, you might be told one thing, but it’s also possible your intuition and your gut are telling you something entirely different. As a decision maker, you should synthesize all the useful information available to you to make a well-informed decision. As long as the price scraping continues, the sellers will always have firsthand information to influence pricing decisions.
Forecasting of Demand and Trends
How can e-commerce startups stand out from the competition in the wake of market research? First and foremost, they can forecast future trends and demands before they occur. Also, price scraping plays a very important role in predicting upcoming trends and demands.
48% of consumers say they are planning to shop more online in the future, according to a survey by Global Web Index. Approximately 21% of all retail sales will be carried out via the Internet by the year 2025, according to data analyzed by market research company Euromonitor International. Purchasing products from online marketplaces is becoming an increasingly popular method for customers. In the US, more than 63% of all online product searches are made at Amazon, and the market places account for half of all global eCommerce. With more and more product searches being made on marketplaces and brand loyalty shrinking, retailers need to tailor their services to improve brand loyalty.
It is important for e-commerce startups to be able to retain their customers and increase customer loyalty as well if they want to succeed. A discount on subscriptions can be a good way to do this. New entrants like startups can take advantage of the discounted prices when they scrape. E-commerce stores working to implement omnichannel are already implementing this step as part of their omnichannel strategy.
Summary
In order to gain an advantage over their competitors by focusing on the price, startups can take advantage of price scraping to gain insight into how their competitors are promoting their products. The data acquisition methods used to collect data can be used by e-commerce stores to be able to take them into the future. Using a tool such as ProxyCrawl, powered by artificial intelligence, in conjunction with human intelligence helps drive efficiency and profitability.
With ProxyCrawl, we are able to provide you with business tools that allow you to create your own automated price scraper and dedicate more time to your core areas of business. Feel free to contact us right now to start scraping!