If you’re in business, there’s a very high likelihood that you’ve heard the terms ‘competitive edge’ or ‘competitive advantage.’ Well, the two terms are synonymous. Plus, they’re broad and multifaceted. For instance, changing your marketing strategy gives you a competitive advantage. So does understanding your target market’s needs and tailoring prices and the product to meet those needs.
Another fundamental element that gives your business a competitive edge is the ability to compare your products, prices, and performance with your competitors’. Thankfully, by using the powerful web scraping tools available in the market, you can do all this with a few clicks.
Fundamentally, though, price monitoring is paramount, mainly because after unveiling a product, it wouldn’t make any financial sense to tweak it further. Product monitoring will only prove beneficial in the next product revamp after a few months or years.
Price Monitoring And Web Scraping
With price monitoring, you get to observe how your competitors have priced their products, thus enabling you to set prices that ultimately solidify your market position. Traditionally, this was a manual activity – visiting a site, searching products, and writing the prices down on a piece of paper. It used to be too time-consuming and, in most cases, ineffective.
Well, not anymore. Web scraping tools have been a game changer. They perform all these processes autonomously and generate a structured report and, in some instances, a chart of the price trends.
Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from a website. In this regard, price monitoring is a product of web scraping – you can only analyze the charts and reports generated by the scraping tools after they have finalized the data harvesting. The unmatched convenience, when contrasted with manual methods of monitoring the prices, makes new-age web scraping a business necessity.
However, successful web scraping depends on high anonymity because websites don’t condone data harvesting. Web developers include anti-scraping tools that stop any data extraction. Some of these tools include:
● Blocking/banning IP addresses
● Using user-agents (UA)
● CAPTCHAs
● AJAX
● Log-in screens
Use Of Proxy Servers In Web Scraping
Using proxy servers, which rotate the IP addresses regularly, prevents websites from blocking IP addresses whenever you’re extracting data. Rotating IP addresses ensure that the number of web requests per IP address is at a minimum. Hence, the website doesn’t notice any suspicious activities. Notably, websites restrict IP addresses that make too many web requests. In this regard, having a proxy server is a prerequisite to successful price monitoring.
Benefits Of Price Monitoring
Informs The Pricing Strategy
Price monitoring enables you to arrive at the best price(s) for your product(s). Many sellers usually wonder how to price their products to increase sales, generate more revenue, and, therefore, stay ahead of the competition.
Price monitoring deals with this problem head-on. Upon scraping data on how your competitors have priced their products and observing the trends regarding their pricing strategy, it now becomes easy to set your price. Given that your move is backed by a thorough investigation – by your scraping provider – you’re bound to boost sales from your growing customer base.
Thanks to price monitoring, you can set the lowest price when there is a lot of competition or increase the price when the competition is more subdued.
Provides Insight On Consumer Preferences
Scraping the web for data on prices can enable you to identify times when consumer preferences are shifting. All it takes is merely observing how suppliers and other sellers are slashing or increasing prices. If they’re all reducing the cost of products, but the demand is still on a downward spiral, that means that consumers have identified something else. This sets the stage for you to roll out another product or change your strategy altogether.
Reduces Expenditure
Picture this scenario. Your business is refurbishing its offices and even buying new machines and computers. In such a case, many sellers in the market price the products you need differently. Nonetheless, thanks to price monitoring, you can identify the seller with the lowest selling price whom you’ll then deal with throughout. This move will save your company a lot of money, hence reducing expenditure.
Monitor New Entrants
With price monitoring, you can notice new sellers since they often attempt to undercut the prices you’ve set.
Pricing Limited Offers
Imagine a scenario where you’re having a sale, but the prices you’re selling your products at are already higher than your competitors’ prices. Naturally, your target market will purchase from your competitor. This defeats the whole purpose of a sale. With price monitoring, you can price the products listed on your limited offers appropriately.
Price Monitoring Power Conclusion
Running a business is akin to playing a game of chess - it’s all about strategy and making the right moves at the right time to counter your opponents’ (competitor’s) pricing actions. Price monitoring provides the necessary insight for successful countering when managing a company.
