When running a business, you have to consider many different factors if you want to grab your share of the markets. You can use many practices to improve your operation, and monitoring your competitor’s prices is one of them.
You can do that with web scraping – a technique that allows you to check prices and tune in your offer to make it more appealing for potential clients while keeping your identity hidden. If you want to know how price monitoring works, keep reading, and we’ll explain everything in more detail.
What is price monitoring?
Price monitoring is also known as price intelligence. It’s a practice that allows you to see competitive prices across multiple platforms.
By gathering data with web scraping, you can analyze competitor prices and create a better pricing strategy based on what you find. Price monitoring allows you to keep a close eye on all prices in real-time. Doing so will provide you with a few essential benefits that will enable you to improve sales and increase conversions.
Benefits and approaches to monitoring
Monitoring prices is a practice that can help you extract useful information you can then implement into your offer to improve sales. It’s a standard practice used by businesses from all over the world because it’s very effective and efficient. Here’s a quick overview of the benefits you can expect to get:
– Evaluate products and prices of other companies or competitors.
– Get notifications when a competitor puts up a special offer or promotion.
– Follow the market conditions to get a better understanding of your targeted audience.
– Manage the movement of goods in trade.
– Get essential details that can help you improve your supply chain.
– Get a detailed overview of product stocks that allows you to improve your placement.
All of these benefits can help you improve your operation and get an edge over your competition. You should use every bit of information you can to create a better offer, and understanding what your customers want will make the most significant difference. That’s where web scraping can help a lot.
Web scraping as a reliable technique
Web scraping is a method used to extract any type of public data directly from the internet. It uses an extractor or a script to gather the data you want based on a keyword or a product name. Once you enter the word you want to scrape, the tool will scan the entire internet and provide you with tons of public data.
Lastly, the data is then pushed through an analytics platform, allowing you to get more information about prices, make future predictions, compare your offer with the competition, and create a better offer for your customers. In other words, web scraping can help you make better business decisions and improve your entire operation.
You can also set up an ongoing monitoring operation that will allow you to see what your competition is doing in real-time. You will be able to see price changes in real-time and tune your offer with the competition. Web scraping is simply a powerful tool that can help your business grow at a steady pace.
Proxies and their role in data acquisition
Naturally, your competitors don’t want you to know what they are doing, so they will try to prevent you from gathering the information you need. The most common method of avoiding competition monitoring is blocking your IP address. As you scrape their website multiple times, they will be able to identify your IP address and block it from accessing the website in the future.
However, if you use a proxy, you will be able to keep monitoring your competition without them knowing a thing. Proxies will act as a protective shield between your device and the internet. Every time you send out a request, a proxy will disguise your original IP address with another one originating far away from your location, making it impossible to track.
Every time you use a web scraper, you will get a different IP, effectively preventing your competition from blocking you on their website.
Types of proxies
There are many different types of proxies designed for specific industries and uses. However, all of them are made to improve online protection and provide full anonymity. The most popular types of proxies are:
– Transparent proxies
– Anonymous proxies
– Distorting proxies
– Residential proxies
– Datacenter proxies
– Public proxies
– Private proxies
Residential proxies are the best choice for web scraping because they use real IP addresses from all over the world. In other words, you will appear as a real user every time you connect to a server, making it impossible to track you down and block you from accessing the information you want.
Conclusion
Web scraping is a must if you want to ensure that your business operation follows the latest market trends. It can help you gather vital information you can use to improve your offer, make sure that your entire operation is running smoothly.
With the use of proxies, you can run your web scraping operation indefinitely, without your competition even knowing that you’re monitoring them. Keep in mind that they will probably use the same methods to see what you are doing too.