Finding the right price for your product isn’t easy. To be constantly competitive and up to date with market fluctuations is even harder.
How you decide to approach your pricing strategy will make or break your brand’s performance. And in today’s digital landscape, it’s more important than ever that your products’ price tags are based on informed decisions deduced from the latest data.
But with so much data out there, how can you possibly keep track of it all? This is where automated pricing intelligence and the use of a web or Google scraper comes in.
What is pricing intelligence?
Pricing intelligence (or competitive price monitoring) is the process of tracking and analyzing the prices of both individual competitors and the market as a whole. This enables businesses to make informed decisions about product pricing and repricing.
By using pricing intelligence software businesses can automatically scrape the web for competitor pricing data. Such pricing intelligence tools collect and analyze vast amounts of data, often directly in real-time, to help create a data-driven pricing strategy that’s tailored to business needs.
Why pricing intelligence is important
Did you know that Amazon reportedly changes its products’ prices every 10 minutes?
Their automated pricing intelligence software analyzes massive data sets with dozens of data points– from competitors’ prices to stock levels to search trends – to predict the most profitable price for a product at any given moment.
Of course, your business won’t have the same big data at its disposal. But with the help of pricing intelligence tools, you too can scrape web data relating to your brand to gain market insights and act before competitors do.
And this is more important than ever. Consumers can access and compare prices across the market in a matter of seconds. So using price intelligence to keep your prices competitive at all times is crucial if you want your business to thrive.
Pricing intelligence: step-by-step
Pricing intelligence works in (roughly) three stages:
Determine what data you want to collect
Collect and monitor that data (more on this below)
Analyze that data to make informed pricing decisions
Although you can do this manually, it’s not only highly inefficient, it’s practically impossible to collect and analyze all available data (especially if you own a large business with hundreds of SKUs).
Instead, most companies use price intelligence software to automate the process. So how do these tools work?
How is the pricing data acquired?
Once you’ve identified your competitors, pricing software solutions can help you track and monitor their prices across the web. But that’s not all.
Most sophisticated competitive price monitoring tools can help you track all sorts of competitor data like product prices, features, ratings, and much more. This is done via web scraping techniques.
What is web scraping and how does it work?
Web scraping (also called data scraping or web harvesting) is a way to gather data from selected web pages. Although it’s possible to do this manually, it tends to be automated via bots or web crawlers.
Web pages are made up of text-based markup languages. The most common example is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The HTML of a web page instructs the browser how a page should be displayed.
Web scraping tools can read this HTML and filter out useful information. This information can then be extracted and stored in the preferred format (e.g. in a spreadsheet).
In a nutshell, this is what web scraping looks like:
A web page consists of HTML content.
A bot crawls the page and analyzes the HTML.
The bot converts the HTML into structured data, often called data parsing (e.g. copying relevant information and pasting it into a spreadsheet)
Different web scraper tools
Web scraping tools come in many different sizes and prices, from a simple Chrome plugin to powerful software that can process vast data sets.
Many businesses use Google (or general search engine) scrapers to collect data from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Dedicated (for example for Google shopper) and other engine scrapers exist as well. Such scrapers don’t follow the links to the actual web pages but extract all data from what appears in the SERPs. Other web scrapers go further than that and scrape (parts of) your competitors’ websites.
How is it used for pricing strategies?
With all this data at your fingertips, the big question is: What will you do with it?
The most common way businesses use web scraping for pricing intelligence is by analyzing the data to inform their pricing strategies.
Pricing strategies involve more than just offering the lowest price. They take into account business-specific factors like your revenue goals, brand positioning, or marketing objectives.
For example, you could apply a cost-plus pricing strategy, which prices your product by taking the cost of production and adding your desired profit.
However, businesses driven by pricing intelligence often prefer a more up-to-date, flexible, and competitor-driven pricing strategy. As such, most of these businesses choose a dynamic pricing strategy.
Take the Amazon example. The industry giant uses web-scraping intelligence to update prices every 10 minutes. This is dynamic pricing in its ultimate form, and one of the main reasons why Amazon dominates the e-commerce market.
Your business, too, can use a web scraper tool to regularly scrape the SERPs or competitor web pages to analyze the market and calculate the best pricing for your product(s) at any given moment.
Updating your prices regularly means you are always up-to-date and competitive in your pricing. And doing this through pricing intelligence means you can do so whilst keeping an eye on your margins.
Conclusion
You can opt for a search engine results scraper or choose a web scraper to extract data directly from your competitors’ web pages. Either way, the right pricing intelligence tool will help you improve your company’s pricing strategy.
Nowadays, manually monitoring your prices and repricing accordingly is not just tedious, it’s outdated. If you want to stay ahead of the competition in today’s digital landscape, you need to have accurate and automated pricing intelligence to help you make real-time decisions.
0 Comments