In today's highly competitive market, knowing what your competitors charge for similar products or services is essential. By understanding your competition's pricing strategies, you can make informed decisions about your pricing and stay competitive in the market.
However, manually collecting competitor prices can take time and effort. Luckily, data scraping with the right tool can help find and collect prices, and automate the process so it becomes quick and smooth. Moreover, you will also receive accurate information to make informed decisions about your pricing strategy. Before going ahead, you would need to understand the different pricing factors of competitive pricing to plan strategically and efficiently.
This blog post will discuss how to get competitor pricing using data scraping. But before that, let's clearly understand what data scraping means.
What is Data Scraping?
Generally, data scraping or web scraping is the process of automatically collecting data from websites. It involves extracting data from HTML pages, parsing it, and storing it in a structured format, such as a spreadsheet or database.
Data scraping can be conducted manually, but it's usually done using automated software tools. These tools use algorithms to extract specific data from websites, such as product information, customer reviews, or competitor pricing.
Price Scraping
Price scraping is a process that focuses on extracting competitor prices from websites and online platforms. Similar to general data scraping, you can scrape prices using pricing platforms.
While you can gather this information manually, businesses prefer using an automated tool to collect, store in an organised structure and analyse the data. This process significantly reduces the time and bandwidth required when done otherwise.
Now, let's look at why data scraping is essential for business.
Why is Data Scraping Important?
Scraping data is crucial as it lets you get ample information through a streamlined process. It saves managers time and resources compared to manually collecting data, and it can provide you with insights that would be difficult to obtain otherwise.
Moreover, leveraging this information to set optimal prices helps you gain a competitive edge and attain maximum revenue. Click on this link to learn the advantages of competitive pricing for B2B companies.
Let's take a closer look at why scraping data is essential. For example, data scraping can be used to:
- Monitor competitor pricing
- Collect customer reviews and feedback
- Track social media mentions of your brand
- Extract data for market research and analysis
- Gather data for academic or scientific research
How to Get Competitor Pricing using Data Scraping?
You can scrape data from the website manually using specific programming languages. However, due to today's fast-paced business executions, you can scrape prices using ready-made software tools to extract data from websites.
Here's how to scrape data from a website in general:
- Identify the website you want to check and the data you want to collect.
- Use a scraping tool to extract data from the website.
- Parse the data to extract the specific information you need.
- Store the data in a structured format, such as a CSV file or database.
Data scraping can be done using a variety of programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. Moreover, many scraping tools also have user interfaces that allow non-technical users to scrape data without writing code.
Now, let's look at a strategic method on how to find competitor pricing.
How to Scrape Prices from Competitors' Websites and Online Platforms?
This section discusses how to find competitor pricing and other metrics to start an analysis. In short, you'd have to identify your direct competitors and then understand the metrics you need. You also need to place your objective in gathering this information and how you can implement it in your pricing strategy. Next, let's look at how to scrape data from a website to maintain competitive pricing.
Step 1: Identify Your Competitors
Before you can start scraping competitor pricing data, you need to identify who your competitors are. First, list all the companies that offer similar products or services to yours. You can use search engines or industry directories to find them.
You can categorise your competitors in three ways: primary, secondary and tertiary. Once you’ve done that, you can focus on the direct competitors to determine your immediate pricing decisions. Head to our competitive pricing analysis blog to learn more about categorizing competitors.
Step 2: Determine the Data You Want to Collect
Once you have identified your competitors, you must determine the data you want to collect. Of course, pricing is the most critical data to manage, but you may also want to collect other data, such as product descriptions, customer reviews, and shipping costs.
You can scrape all your competitors' prices and record them in a structured system. For a comprehensive analysis, you may want to gather the following:
- Price index
- Product availability
- Competitor's additional offers
To understand better, you can go to our competitive pricing analysis blog for more information.
Step 3: Choose a Data Scraping Tool
In this step, you can scrape data from websites. But, instead of scraping prices manually, you should use a price scrapping tool to do the work for you. These data scraping tools extract various data types from websites and are not limited to just prices.
Of the many data scraping tools, some popular ones include Scrapy, Beautiful Soup, and Selenium. These tools allow you to extract data from websites and store it in a structured format like Excel or Google Sheets for organised storage.
Step 4: Create Your Data Scraping Script
Once you have chosen a data scraping tool, you need to create a scraping script. Your scraping script should include the URLs of the websites you want to scrape, the data you wish to collect, and any rules you want to apply to the scraping process.
Step 5: Run Your Data Scraping Script
Once you have created your scraping script, you need to run it. The scraping process can take some time, depending on the number of websites you are scraping and the amount of data you are collecting.
Step 6: Analyse Your Scraped Data
After the data scraping process is complete, you need to analyse the data you have collected. You can use tools such as Excel or Python to analyse the data and identify trends in your competitors' pricing strategies.
Step 7: Make Informed Decisions About Your Pricing Strategy
Finally, you can use your collected data to make informed decisions about your pricing strategy. By understanding your competitors' pricing strategies, you can set your prices at a competitive and profitable level.
Now that you understand how to get competitor pricing through price scraping let's look at a more efficient and sustainable alternative for the longer term. That is the use of AI and ML-driven pricing platforms. Such price scrapping tools leverage mature datasets, macro conditions, and market trends to recommend prices.
Use an AI-Driven Pricing Platform to Scrape, Analyse Data and More
Pricing platforms that use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning do much more than scrape data from websites. Using API, platforms like SYMSON can help you get data from online eCommerce platforms like Amazon, Google Shopping and other websites. Such competitive pricing platforms help assemble data and present it in an organized manner for more straightforward analysis. It helps managers visualise the data and draw insights more seamlessly.
Moreover, SYMSON also leverages it into complex calculations, considering multiple factors, to generate recommendations for price changes. Furthermore, SYMSON can even automatically adjust the prices if so desired.
Pricing Software Recommends Optimal Competitive Prices
You receive optimal price recommendations where you can add your own business rules for healthy profits and not lose margins. You can even apply other business rules so your goals align with the platform’s optimisation. Such tools study the macro scenario of the market like geographical, climate context, etc. They also consider the current economic case while developing prices.
Moreover, platforms like SYMSON enable you to use various pricing strategies that best fit your business goals. If you want to stay prepared for the future, you can set scenarios and run future predictions! Its intelligent algorithm continues to study the market and current condition and automatically reacts to changes, thereby suggesting the best prices.
Better yet, you can clearly understand the logic behind each recommendation as SYMSON uses explainable AI. Read more on how to implement competitive pricing in SYMSON for a clear understanding.
Conclusion
Data scraping can be an effective way to collect competitor pricing data quickly and efficiently. Following the steps outlined in this blog post, you can use data scraping to gain a competitive advantage in the market. However, it's important to remember that data scraping must be done ethically and legally. Always obtain permission before scraping data from a website, and ensure you are not violating any laws or regulations.
Do you want a free demo to try how SYMSON can help your business with margin improvement or pricing management? Do you want to learn more? Schedule a call with a consultant and book a 20 minute brainstorm session!
