There are many tactics, such as price scraping, that can help you bolster your processes and stay ahead of the competition. Marketing is definitely the strongest weapon in your arsenal.
But what if you could further improve your marketing by developing and devising data-driven pricing strategies? Staying ahead of the competition by offering the same or better quality products and services at competitive prices sounds good, right?
That’s exactly what scraping brings to the table. Here is everything you need to know about it and how it can affect your business.
What is Price Scraping?
Price scraping is derived from the term web scraping. It’s the process of bots going through websites, pulling information, and storing. Price scraping is essentially the same process when the same bots are used but only to pull information about products and service prices.
Over time, price scraping has become a go-to solution for competitive price monitoring. Bots used for price scraping can be fine-tuned to pull additional valuable information related to pricing on any website. Though, most commonly, they are used for scraping travel, hospitality, and e-commerce sites.
Price scraping deliverables are in-depth reports of pricing strategies competitors in your niche have at the moment. These reports have the power to help you leverage a pricing strategy to set your business to success.
How does it Benefit your Business?
Pricing strategies are never set in stone. They are, in fact, quite dynamic and a result of a long-term effort. Thanks to the price scraping report, you will be able to enter the game of dynamic pricing information. How does it benefit your business?
There are lots of ways to influence consumer-buying decisions, and dynamic pricing information is one of them. Thanks to price scraping, you will be able to custom-tailor your prices in real-time because the price scraping bots pull data in real-time.
If we were to translate price scraping driven pricing policy by using jargon, then it would be data-driven undercutting. But the more common term is the “price monitoring strategy”.
The whole thing especially applies to price-sensitive buyers. They are particularly aware of the baseline prices of the products and services they are interested in. Offer them prices lower than baseline ones, and you will boost your sales and increase your revenue.
How is it achieved?
There are hundreds of bots behind the price scraping process. These bots are in charge of visiting the competitors’ websites and online shops in search of products and services prices and other relevant information regarding the prices.
These bots act like humans. They visit the targeted websites and check product pages. However, they do it ultra-fast. The scraping bots are able to visit all product pages and pull the prices in a matter of minutes. It all depends on how many products and/or service pages are there on a website.
This is not something that you can do on a single website. The bots can do a complete competitor pricing policy recon mission as long as you provide them with a list of your competitor’s website addresses. The final result is a report which you can use to gather powerful insights and adjust your pricing policy accordingly.
How much does it Cost to Set up?
Since there are so many price scraping service providers, we are only going to talk about approximate prices. First, let’s break down a price scraping service into smaller chunks and see how much each of them costs.
To run price scraping, you will need a web scraper bot. To get a bot and have it implemented, you will need to pay approximately $500. You will also have to rent a server that will serve as your scraper bot base of operations and a place to store all that scraped data. Servers usually cost around $500 a month.
Price scraper bot and server have to be maintained, which will cost you approximately an additional $500 a month. And, finally, you can’t use the data raw. Data processing services, which include data normalization, merging, and processing go for around $10,000.
If we add the numbers, we come to a figure of $12,500. It’s the initial, so-called implementation cost. Every following month will cost you approximately $1,000.
Conclusion
Price scraping can appear as a costly investment, especially that implementation cost part. But all things considered, it is a powerful tool that potentially packs a good ROI. Thanks to data in the price scraping report, you will be able to devise and implement a price monitoring strategy and attract all those price-sensitive consumers to your website.
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