The E-commerce industry is growing rapidly. There are about 12 million – 24 million e-commerce sites in the world. Being a part of the E-commerce industry, you might understand the importance of good prices. With new e-commerce sites being developed every day. It’s necessary that your products have competitive prices, to stay at top of the game.

According to Wiser’s survey, 96% of participants said they compare prices before buying a product. 

But how do you know the prices your competitors are offering? What if you have 200+ competitors? Will you go and check each and every website to document their prices? Of Course Not! Hiring an E-Commerce Price Scraper is the solution.

Luckily, you are already at the right place. Alnusoft can do credible E-commerce Prive Scraping for you.

What is E-commerce Price Scraping?

E-commerce Price scraping is the extraction of prices using a price web crawler or a bot. 

The price crawler gathers the price information of products from E-commerce sites. It copies the required data from the websites. Then, it will let you create large datasets for analysis. So you can drive your business listings pricing strategy. 

A good price scraper should extract data like 

• Brand name: Find brands selling similar or the same products.
• Attributes: Compare the products, based on their color, size, etc
• Product name: Match the product name of competitors’ sites with your product. 
• Price & Promotion: Check the prices and track if there are discounts or promotions.
• Product Description: How does the competitor describe the product for leads?
• Availability: How many pieces of that product are in stock?

You can use all this scraped information to target customers who are looking for a similar item. 

Related: What is job scraping?

How Does It Work? 

Like web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. Price scraping is the process of gathering product prices and data. Price scraping and their comparison helps eCommerce companies know the real-time selling prices. 

Web crawlers fetch the product data and prices from various competitor E-commerce portals. The price data is then cleaned and normalized into a ready-to-use format. Normalization is an important step. The data might contain some characters that might cause problems during price matching. You can then connect this clean data to your system for price comparison. This pricing process can be automated further by using an algorithm. This algorithm will automatically make changes to your input prices as per the rules. 

Hence, it is essential to keep a check on your competitors stock and their prices to gain an edge in the industry. 

Is Price Scraping Legal?

Like web scraping, price scraping is not illegal either. Yes, some businesses do believe that it has its disadvantages. Price scraping slows down customers’ visits to their websites, lowering conversions. Therefore marketplace websites have created barriers to limit data crawling. Such as Robot.txt, IP bans, Honeypots, Captchas, Dynamic content, etc

 You can easily scrape data from Amazon, eBay, or any other e-commerce website. Some websites might display prices only after you log in. You will have to accept its terms and conditions. You should carefully read those terms before scraping the prices to stay on the safe side.

What are the benefits of price scraping?

Price scraping helps you to know 

• Customer behavior: It allows businesses to understand customers’ buying behavior. The prices they are ready to pay for the products. This information can be used by businesses to define their pricing strategies.
  
• Competitor analysis: Price scraping also helps businesses understand their competitors’ price techniques. It will help them understand which products have static pricing. Whereas products’ prices are adjustable as per market demand.

Free Price Scraping Tools

Price scraping can be done manually. Users access websites and extract the required data themselves. But it’s very time-consuming. Businesses can use web scraping bots also. A bot is an automated software that targets and extracts data from websites. The bot will access the website’s robot.txt file. This file contains lists of URLs that the bot will crawl for pulling out data.

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a free-for-life website scraper. You can use it to scrape data from websites like eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress. The Octoparse interface is very user-friendly and powerful. You can simulate the human browsing behavior for scraping data from the Workflow Designer pane. You can also use Proxy IP by choosing some Advanced options.

You can efficiently scrape data like prices and product reviews. 

2. ScrapingBot

Scraping Bot is another great tool for scraping data from a URL. It’s free to test out with 100 credits every month. It’s good for product pages collecting details like product title, price, and description. It is a good tool for collecting Ecommerce data. 

It also offers several APIs specializing in fields like Google search results. Along with data collection from social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc).

3. ScrapeStorm

ScrapeStorm is another price scraping tool. It has a Starter plan which is free but has some limitations. This visual web scraping tool was made by ex-Google crawlers. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically identify images, prices, and contact details. It also supports simulation operations in case the automatic identification doesn’t work.

E-commerce scraping can prove to be very beneficial. It gives you insights into your competitors’ marketing strategies and prices. It will make your business competitive and bring sales.