Competitive Pricing Intelligence Web Scraping

Price is one of the most important factors for your customers when shopping online. This is why any change in either your or your competitor’s pricing can have a direct impact on the bottom line of your business.

To stay on top of their pricing strategy, companies may need to track their product’s prices and compare them to their competitor’s prices multiple times a day. Fortunately, gathering price intelligence data is no longer a tiresome, labor-intensive, nor inaccurate task. We can now easily automate price intelligence by using intelligently designed web crawlers.

Competitive Price Intelligence is all about knowing how the market and competitor’s prices affect your buyer’s purchasing decisions and leveraging web data to make better pricing, marketing, and business decisions. Using the right data, you can optimize your pricing strategy and drive more profitability for your business.

In this guide, we’ll give you a sneak peek into three of the most common and impactful use cases where businesses track, monitor, and analyze competitor and market pricing data to make educated pricing decisions.

• Competitive intelligence
• Dynamic pricing
• MAP monitoring

Competitive intelligence

Web data extraction is a great tool to monitor your competitors, products, and prices and assess market trends to get an overall view of the market. Competitive intelligence can be leveraged to make sure your pricing strategy is up to date. This is especially useful for brands and e-commerce companies.

Dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing takes competitive intelligence to the next level by combining competitor pricing data with internal data to make automated pricing decisions. This allows companies to be proactive and regularly adjust their pricing in response to real-time demand, supply, and competitor benchmarks.

MAP monitoring

If you have multiple retailers selling your products you always have to keep an eye on them to make sure there are no minimum advertised price violations. Monitoring retailer/reseller prices is a great way to get alerted if there’s a price violation so that you can take appropriate actions to resolve the problem.

Price crawling vs Price intelligence

Price crawling is where spiders crawl a website’s data to extract relevant information like price, product, description, etc., and then present it in a structured, readable format. But it's not as simple as it sounds. A lot of times, scaling up data extraction can prove to be very challenging.

Price intelligence adds more layers to the crawled data by providing actionable insights that can be used to develop a holistic pricing strategy. The process involves multiple steps like URL discovery, data extraction, data matching, data quality assurance, and reporting and analytics.

In simple terms, price crawling is extracting large amounts of raw pricing data from the web while price intelligence goes deeper by combining the high-quality crawled data with quality assurance, analysis, and reporting.

Learn more about web scraping for price intelligence data

Here at Zyte , we have been in the web scraping industry for 12 years. We have helped extract web data for more than 1,000 clients ranging from Government agencies and Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups and individuals. During this time we gained a tremendous amount of experience and expertise in web data extraction. 

Here are some of our best resources if you want to deepen your web scraping knowledge:

• Price scraping: The best free tool to scrape prices
• Price intelligence with Python: Scrapy, SQL, and Pandas
• Price gouging or economics at work: Price intelligence to track Consumer sentiment
• Web scraping webinar: Fuelling price intelligence with web data extraction
• The build in-house or outsource decision
• What you can use web scraping for