How Does Price Scraping Help E-Commerce Startups?

E-Commerce has been a quickly developing business for years, and it will enhance to grow in the future. Around the world, there are also approximately 12 million to 24 million e-commerce sites, with more being formed every day. The most important thing for e-commerce firms is to have a thorough understanding of the marketplace, which price scraping allows them to do.

What is Price Scraping?

Price scraping is the extraction of pricing data from a website using a script or a web crawler. Web scraping software searches for, locates, and copies information from websites to be tested later. You can gather competitive product data and prices from websites using these processes.

Price scraping spiders resemble the behavior of a real-life web user by navigating to a target competitor's webpage and retrieving the information specified. As a result, price scraping has become an effective approach for online stores to achieve a competitive edge by having near real-time awareness of their prices and stock availability.

Why Do E-Commerce Startups Need to Extract Prices?

For e-commerce startup companies looking to accelerate their growth, being surrounded by enough information, particularly useful data, can be one of the critical premises that leads to further progress.

The cost of the product must be prioritized among huge data. When determining the ideal price, e-commerce startups must consider the competition. If you can offer a lower cost than your biggest competitors, you will likely be able to quickly overtake them.

Price scraping assists e-commerce startup companies in setting the price that includes their expenses while keeping them competitive. It can save e-commerce startups from deep issues like customer loss in today's increasingly digital-first world.

Furthermore, price scraping is an efficient method of conducting market research. Jeroen, who has a technological back story, has spent many years working as an IT director inside a digital manufacturing company. In 2020, he merged to form an e-commerce startup and co-founded an online retailing company with four other team members. Jeroen and his team did not indicate the types of commodities, unlike some other e-commerce sites. They concentrated on items that could appear in anyone's daily life and decided which ones would be placed on store shelves.

Jeroen and his team's startup's product line has expanded over the last year to include household supplies, kitchen supplies, and gardening supplies. Below mentioned is the procedure of how the product line was broadened.

Using iWeb Scraping for Price Extraction

If you're going to use a price scraper, iWeb Scraping should be your first choice. It is indeed a web scraping technology that allows you to create your own price scraper in just a few clicks. Sometimes if you do not have experience with coding, you could easily obtain the price data you require using the tool. There are two methods for scraping prices from e-commerce websites:

1. In-Built Templates for Price Scraping

In iWeb Scraping, a variety of scrapers are created for clients to grab data without coding, and they are referred to as "Templates." When you first launch the software, go to "+New" > "Task Templates" to select a template.

A variety of scrapers are built for users to scrape data without coding and they are called “Templates” in Octoparse. When you enter the software, click on “+New” > “Task Templates” to choose a template you need.

Let us just take "US URL Amazon" as an example. With all of this template, you can scrape the web pages of Amazon products to obtain basic information such as prices, titles, URLs, ASINs, and so on. What users have to do is enter the necessary parameters. The data can then be extracted after users save it and operate the template.

2. Creating a Workflow

You can use the "Advanced Mode" to create a workflow to customize the price scraper to your specific needs. The key to making a strong price scraper is to precisely locate the data and instruct the robot to retrieve it. iWeb Scraping has translated the programming process into a point-and-click user interface that you can work on. Simply copy the URL of the desired page, paste it into the search box, and press "Start":

How Do E-Commerce Startups Use Price Scraping?

1. Price Monitoring

For e-commerce locations to maintain customer loyalty over time, user experience is essential, while the price is the most important factor, particularly for first-time purchasers. Price scraping is extremely important for sellers with a lot of competition to find the perfect price point that will attract customers and earn a profit. Apparently, the ideal price level is unlikely to be fixed in a market trend, highlighting the significance of price monitoring.

Price retrieval assists e-commerce Startups in tracking and monitoring rates from retailers, third-party sellers, and competitors. The price monitoring method enables entrepreneurs to take action to keep their brands' prices in check and competitive while avoiding price wars. Furthermore, scraped price levels guide entrepreneurs to move and modify their pricing policy at any time. "Data-backed price management initiatives bring significant results in the short term: 2% -7% increase in business margins and a 200–350% average growth in ROI over 12-month period," according to Deloitte.

2. Market Research

To sustain the strong competition, every e-commerce webpage must conduct market research. Price scraping allows e-commerce Startups to create large, customized datasets at a low cost, laying the groundwork for subsequent research.

Market research will help e-commerce Startups companies understand what their customers expect from their websites. It gives sellers a qualitative and quantitative knowledge of why their best clients would like to buy their products. The right price is one of the most important factors that influence purchasing behavior. Price scraping allows e-commerce Startups to better know the reasons by the most acceptable cost.

The beauty of market analysis is that it integrates science and intuition. Your gut instinct might well be trying to tell you one thing, but the information is informing you of something else. To make the best decision, you must combine all of the most recent and relevant data. When it comes to product pricing decisions, as long as cost scraping is ongoing, sellers could always obtain first-hand data that can make the overall decision.

3. Demand and Trend Prediction

For seizing the opportunity of the market research, the e-commerce Startups starts predicting the latest patterns and demands. Price scraping also plays an important role in forecasting.

In a study of consumers conducted by Global Web Index, 48% stated that they will open a store online these days. According to Euromonitor International, a market researcher, 21% of all retail trade will be conducted online by 2025. Furthermore, marketplaces are progressively becoming popular option of purchase for customers. A Quarter of any global online shopping occurs on a marketplace, and Amazon accounts for more than 63% of all product searches conducted online in the United States. As more product searches begin on marketplaces and brand loyalty declines, retailers must truly personalize their service and provide a human touch to improve brand loyalty.

After gaining new customers, e-commerce Startups must retain those customers and increase customer loyalty. Subscription discounts can be effective in achieving this goal. This is already being done by several e-commerce sellers. Scraping the discount prices eases the way for newcomers such as Startups.

Conclusion

Price scraping can help e-commerce Startups delve deeper into how their competitors market their products through price. Acquiring data in this manner has the potential to uplift e-commerce stores forward. Using an AI-powered price scraping tool backed by human intelligence, such as iWeb Scraping, is also a something that for increasing efficiency and profitability.

If you want to construct your own fully automated price scraper and invest extra time on key business areas, iWeb Scraping has you covered.

Contact us today to begin your scraping adventure!