E-Commerce Success: Harnessing the Power of Price Monitoring
E-Commerce has become a major force to reckon with in the business landscape. Every major global product or service company now has an e-commerce outfit to reach Internet users and improve sales. As expected, the more companies enter the e-commerce space, the more competitive the concept becomes. Hence, engaging strategies and methods that can result in a competitive edge are pertinent. One of the many potential strategies is Price Monitoring.
Consequently, this article will explore the concept of price monitoring, how it aids online business success, and how tools like an e-commerce scraper can be leveraged to heighten the efficiency of the monitoring process.
What is price monitoring?
Price monitoring involves tracking, collecting, sorting, and analyzing price-related data points from other businesses in the industry to make competitive decisions for a business. Beyond historical data, price monitoring also consumes real-time data to gain insights into trends and predicted price futures.
The information gathered during price monitoring has evidence of being vital to business growth, as companies can make better decisions related to product and brand positioning, market competitiveness, and product pricing.
Use of price monitoring
As a business, every investment decision has to be backed by reasons and data. Owing to this, here are some use cases that make committing resources to price monitoring a good idea.
Competitive intelligence
Business intelligence is critical to business growth in the 21st century. You want to know what your competitors know about the industry. More importantly, you want to know more than them, as that will guide you to put your business ahead of the curve.
By identifying price fluctuations, discount measures, promotional offers, and all, you can quickly figure out the business strategy of your competitor. Then, you can respond or proactively act accordingly.
Dynamic pricing
Leveraging real-time data can help businesses implement dynamic pricing of their products and services. As such, constantly monitoring factors like demand, supply, consumer behavior, competitor activity, etc., can help keep their products priced at a competitive range to maximize revenue.
Inventory management
Knowing what people are interested in and how much they are willing to pay for it can help businesses decide which product to keep stock of. Companies need to identify their strengths, and price monitoring plays a significant role.
The role of web scraping in price monitoring
The price monitoring process can be conducted manually. However, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you go that route. Automating the process through web scraping is the best option, and this section will explore why that is the case.
Data collection
Data is created every second on the internet. Consequently, it’s near impossible to collect this data manually. Even if it’s possible, collecting at scale will be impossible. Web scraping tools like an e-commerce scraper solve these issues.
Web scrapers – third-party or custom-made tools – automate data collection, gathering price details, product info, inventory insights, etc., from other e-commerce platforms. The scraping scripts can also target and collect from multiple pages simultaneously. The sheer scale businesses can reach with web data collection makes scraper tools crucial.
Real-time updates
Getting real-time data is essential to making business decisions in the 21st century. Beyond staying ahead of the curve regarding product pricing and price monitoring, data points can also help companies understand their competitors’ marketing strategies.
Market research and competitive intelligence
Data acquired during web scraping culminates in business intelligence. Companies can gain a competitive advantage through such data, especially regarding new markets. Data can help businesses spot opportunities that competitors are missing, sometimes creating an entirely new subsect of the industry.
How to collect data for price monitoring
Data is everywhere. However, the process may yield inefficiencies without the right tools to collect quality and optimized data. Hence, when a company has decided to scrape the web for data during price monitoring, there are two possible approaches:
Self-made web scrapers
Web scrapers are tools that can be developed in-house by interested parties. Businesses get full control of their scraping process with a custom-made web scraper. It’s also easy to customize these scrapers to the company’s needs. However, pulling this off will require technical expertise and a small team to manage the project at scale.
In developing an in-house web scraper, different programming languages can be used. For instance, you can build your tool with Java, Node JS, Python, etc. Though, it’s advised that the development of in-house web scrapers should be done with Python, as it has libraries like BeautifulSoup or Scrapy that can make the work easier.
Pre-made web scrapers, like e-commerce scrapers
Third-party pre-made e-commerce scrapers can also help businesses do the trick of data collection. These tools can help you get any type of data and offer intuitive interfaces that help you navigate easily until you get the insights you need. Advanced scraping tools also make it possible to customize the resources to your needs, and you don’t need any technical expertise to maintain the tool. The downside, however, is that the entire customization you can do is within the scope of whatever the tool offers.
Conclusion
Getting the data you need for price monitoring is vital. And while pre-made scraping tools like e-commerce scrapers offer less flexibility, their pre-installed resources will help you get as much data as possible to scale your business.
