How to get the best prices for your products with scraping and price intelligence

What is Web Scraping?

Web Scraping

Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from an internet site.

It is not like screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored during a database. The scraper can then replicate the entire website content elsewhere.

Role of web scraping

Most people would be ready to only manually copy and paste the info available. However, it’s not feasible to try to do it for giant websites with many pages.

This is where web scraping comes into play. With the assistance of web scraping, you’ll extract data from any website, regardless of how large is that the data, on your computer.

Moreover, websites may have data that you simply cannot copy and paste. Web scraping can assist you to extract any quiet data that you simply want.

Web scraping also helps you change or save your data during a format of your choice. once you extract web data with the assistance of an internet scraping too, you’d be ready to save the info during a format like CSV. you’d then be able to retrieve, analyze and use the data the way you’d like.

In simple terms, web scraping saves you the problem of manually downloading or copying any data and automates the whole process.

What is price scraping?

price scraping

Price scraping is an illegal competitive price monitoring tool used to track other valuable information mainly used for e-commerce and travel sites. Competitors use this strategy to draw in price-sensitive buyers by setting their prices less than standard prices within the marketplace.

Attacks frequently occur in industries where products are easily comparable and price plays a serious role in purchasing decisions. Victims of price scraping can include travel agencies, ticket sellers, and online electronics vendors.

For perpetrators, a successful price scraping may result in their offers being prominently featured on comparison websites—used by customers for both research and buying. Meanwhile, scraped sites often experience customer and revenue losses.

How do price comparison websites work

Price comparison websites extract essential details like product prices, reviews, features, and descriptions from multiple sites. These details are then compiled on the worth comparison website and tailored accordingly for straightforward access. So, when a buyer searches for a product on the website, the location quickly compares and lists similar products from a variety of shops. This process simplifies the buying decision of the customer since they will compare factors like price deals, shipping costs, and other features.

However, the algorithms involved depend upon massive data. needless to say, data extraction in real-time isn’t only daunting but time-consuming. As if that wasn’t enough, the dynamic system employed by e-commerce websites makes it difficult to stay on track of the price.

Also, it’s difficult to get data for these websites. the rationale is that the info volume involved is challenging as building a comparison technology to extract different structures of knowledge from websites. Since web scraping became a trend in data extraction, more price comparison websites have emerged over the years, as data extraction is comparatively easy.

Tips on building a successful price comparison website

1.) Pick a distinct segment

Comparison sites are not any longer a secret as many of us have made a successful business using this business model. Hence they’re already many excellent and established price comparison websites. The trick is to always start with a distinct segment, focusing an audience to a really niche market is a superb way of attracting a selected group. 

2.) Identify all the products you would like to aggregate from an internet site 

Make an inventory of these websites and identify all the products you’d want to aggregate. Research all the individual websites to know if they need a knowledge feed, how often prices are updated, and if they provide a commission for promoting their products

3.) Identity all of your data sources.

This is always the toughest and most challenging part of the method. These are the choices you’ll have

(i) Direct Feed from merchants – As traffic from price comparison sites is an excellent source of revenue for eCommerce merchants, some big websites will comply with doing partnerships with comparison sites and supply them a feed directly via an API for a premium charge. The cons of this are sometimes getting real-time data isn’t possible as you’re at the mercy of the merchant.

(ii) Product feeds from third-party API -A few companies have skilled the difficulty of aggregating data from different merchants and providing that feed to interested parties for a premium fee. If you’ve got an enormous budget this is able to be the quickest thanks to getting to plug without development. A typical example of this is able to be an Affiliate network.

(iii) Web scraping – this is often the most cost-effective and provides you most control especially if you’re just beginning and money may be a limitation. you’ll either write custom code or use an internet scraping tool or service to create an internet scraper that will extract your data requirements. you’ll even have the flexibility to form changes or add/remove more data.

4.) Identify features and data enrichment 

Now you’ve got to return up with an experience that will help users shop better than simply presenting all the choices on an easy table. Features could include price alerts, price history, search filters, or aggregated reviews

Data enrichment is different from providing additional value to users, this might include adding calculated fields like average price, price history, price trends, and scores.