In today's world of coupons, special discounts, and much more, price still plays a critical role in customers' decision-making. The challenge that brands face because of the price-driven market functionality is monitoring the competitors' price changes.
In such situations, enterprises cannot do competitor price monitoring on their own. Whether small or huge firms, all need the tools to get started in the market.
So, let us have a rundown of what Competitor Price Tracking is, its benefits, and how web scraping helps check the prices!
Competitor price monitoring tracks variations in the competitor's prices in the market. It aids in optimizing one's price strategy. The changes get monitored daily to get insights about other's products. It even includes the features and prices of the monitored item.
With price tracking becoming easier, one can know about the changes in the costs in real-time. The brands can also make correct decisions related to their pricing strategy immediately.
From helping make informed decisions to staying competitive, the benefits of competitors' price monitoring are many. Let us look at some advantages of using price tracking tools.
Aids in Staying Competitive
One thing that drives consumers' decisions is the cost of the product. As such, the users explore ideal deals by searching on various websites. Here, the marketplace optimizes the prices per customer's demand and other factors.
In such cases, price tracking tools help the brands stay competitive by monitoring prices. This help generates better revenues by maximizing sales and profits.
Help Track Price Fluctuations
Deals, discounts, and special offers attract customers. Big brands and enterprises, thus, keep on changing their prices now and then. Although it is possible to know about the price variations, scanning various websites to know the same is overwhelming.
Here, web scraping done through price monitoring tools makes data extraction easier. The software scrapes the data from different websites, informing about price variations on the spot, thus helping brands make decisions instantly.
Help Increase Revenue
The data extracted from the websites offer industry insights that give a competitive edge. Based on the information scraped, the brands can make decisions and form creative strategies to compete with others. The tools even help check changes in customer preferences, aiding the company in stocking those goods that get demanded more.
By making correct decisions, one can outplay the competitors and increase revenue in the long run.
Give Insight into Stock Availability
The price-tracking software alerts when the stock of a particular product goes down. It helps the brands understand which products need urgent replenishment over others. In other words, it helps the company keep up with the ongoing demand.
Tracking competitor through Web scraping has helped several businesses over time. One can start by sharing the competitor's data points and catalog URLs to scrape relevant data.
But how does web extraction works in reality?
Well, let us dive deeper to know more about it:-
The pricing data gets scraped by web scrapers from the product pages at a pre-determined frequency. It then gets monitored by experts, who check the changes and fluctuations in the website structure.
The web crawlers get set up to check the source pages. The pages get judged to know the HTML tags enclosing the required data points. Once crawlers identify the tags, they get coded per the web crawler's setup and start extracting and storing data into a dump file.
After the data gets dumped, the file gets processed to generate clean data. The procedure also removes the unnecessary HTML tags and text that come with the essential data. It also helps in giving information a proper structure, making it useful for further analysis and storage.
Upon completion of configuration, the crawling setup provides pricing data feeds at intervals.
With a wide variety of tracking tools available, choosing one gets difficult. For your help, listed below are some of the most popular price-tracking tools that brands can use:-
DataCrops
A scalable platform, DataCrops is one of the most sought-after tracking tools today. The best part about the software is that it can extract information from many websites. It provides custom price monitoring, repricing solution, and competitor price comparison. DataCrops also offers promotion monitoring for businesses.
The tool offers insights into market-specific, regional, or product-specific pricing. It thus helps in pointing out the relevance of the current pricing strategy of a brand.
Import.io
A downloadable extension, Import.io is a cloud-based web data integration tool that offers paid plans one can customize. These plans get based on the number of websites the brands want to track. The software provides price monitoring, machine learning, data-driven marketing, and investment research function.
The tool also has a web data integration feature. It gives information on product performance and customer satisfaction reports to the brands.
Mozenda
Mozenda is another price tracking and web scraping tool that offers a 30-day free trial and paid package plans for different users. The tool extracts data from various sources and integrates it with chosen platforms. It then creates data analysis and visualization reports.
Mozenda helps medium-sized software, IT, manufacturing, and healthcare companies gather essential data.
Price2Spy
Price monitoring, comparison, and reprising tool, Price2Spy is a popular software that provides a demo and a 30-day free trial. The tool offers customized daily notifications and historical price charts. It also has price change notifications, a stored cart pricing data feature, and a customizable subscription plan.
Pricefy
Pricefy is a web-based SaaS tool that helps adjust prices, thus allowing users to design promotional posters. It aids enterprises by enabling them to check competitors' prices when required. Pricefy also offers a catalog quality analysis feature to users. It gathers data and product reviews that brands can use to identify areas of improvement.
Luminate Market Price
A SaaS web application, Luminate Market Price recommends intelligent prices on the basis of current and previous data. It analyses the relationship between product prices and demand. The tool can optimize huge volumes of prices daily as required. It thus provides accurate predictions and automated forecasting to end-users.
Before choosing any tool for price monitoring, one should know some basic software features. It should have an automatic price monitoring feature and a competitor stock movement tracker function. The software must have an instant reporting mechanism for price fluctuations. It should also have the ability to perform repricing when required.
With the boost in online shopping trends, brands need to track competitors' prices to stay ahead of them in the marketplace. Today, customers go through different websites, comparing prices and settling for the best deals. As such, web scraping becomes useful. Indeed data scraping has revolutionized how brands work today. It thus serves as a boon for both small and large enterprises in the competitive era.