How do you monitor competitor prices? I have heard that it is scraping data from web pages or crawling the sites like spiders and robots do?
Yes, in order to monitor the prices and stocks of your products across different platforms or for monitoring your competitor, we do scrape data of websites. Our scraping solutions are highly advanced and are non-intrusive and capture the data anonymously. The following terms are often used interchangeably to define Competitor Price Monitoring
What will I need to do to capture the price data of the products sold by my competitor?
In order to capture the price and stock availability data of your competitor, you need to prepare a corresponding list of the actual product pages from your competitor website. This is needed even if you have the SKU's / SKN's /ISBN's or part numbers or product codes. Our experience tells that this is the most neglected & overlooked aspect and is cause of poor quality or mismatched data.
I have to monitor the prices of 1000's of products but it is difficult for me to create a directory or list of webpages from my competitor site. Can you help me?
Yes, we can help to build you the list and provide you with data containing the hyperlinks, product code, and product name from your competitor website. However, compiling and matching the products with your own codes will need to done at your end. This is especially useful if you wish to monitor prices from multiple sources and get a consolidated price comparison file from us on a regular basis.
I sell many products through channel partners such as amazon, ebay, and other similar e-stores? Can you also scrape this data for me?
Yes. We can scrape any data. We need a list of the product codes and the product pages hyperlink to capture the data.
Do I need to do any programming in order to monitor the prices of the competitor's?
No. You do not need to do any programming in order to monitor the prices of your competitor's nor install any software on your computer. Just provide us with your list of pages from which data is to be monitored and our experienced team of programmers will write applications to capture the data in best possible manner. All applications will then run on our high speed servers to capture / web-scrape the data anonymously and non-intrusively, providing you with final data in a format of your choice.
So your solution is "hosted" i.e. you will provide me with price information of the competitor product's that I specify? How frequently can you scrape and provide me with data?
Yes. Our price comparison solution is completely "hosted" and you can get the data daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, as per your requirement.
I need to capture prices that change multiple times during the day. Can you meet this requirement?
Yes. Our price monitoring solution is extremely scalable and we can web scrape the data and send it over to you multiple times during the day.
Is web scraping a legal way to capture data for monitoring prices?
Yes. Web scraping the data to monitor prices is legal provided the data is in public domain and done ethically i.e. taking measures so as to not overwhelm the target site resulting in "Denial of Service" (DoS) messages to other users and visitors of the site or to the extent of bringing it down completely. We closely monitor all the scrapes and make sure our scraping solutions do not disrupt the site in any way, while staying anonymous and non-intrusive.
Can my competitor block your access to the website?
Yes. A website can block scraping. There are a number of ways scraping can be blocked, such as adding image verification (CAPTCHA) system before results are displayed or blocking the IP Addresses from which requests are coming, by monitoring traffic etc. However, we utilize a sophisticated proxy network that anonymizes our traffic. Using our years of experience, we also balance the traffic so as to not get noticed and stay below the below the radar.
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