The internet in 2023 revolves around one main rule – data is king. Modern companies are always on the lookout for usable public information as well as a better understanding of markets and their competitors.
The web is full of big data that can be analyzed to drive well-educated business decisions but the manual construction of massive data sets is a near-impossible human endeavor.
Instead of manual contact with the structures created by godlike technology, data scientists use the same IT solutions to collect information from social media platforms, retailer websites, search engines, and other sources.
When most competitive businesses use data collection to monitor other players, the whole market is in a constant cycle of information exchange, where the fastest collector can make real-time adjustments faster daily.
This gives plenty of advantages: you can track the introduction of new products into the market, compare prices, active discounts, and other data that could make the competitor more attractive.
The best way to automatically collect data is called web scraping. Data scrapers are simple but powerful tools that follow a predetermined script or algorithm to automatically collect data from many sources.
In this article, we will discuss the most common use case for web scrapers – data collection for price intelligence.
Here you will learn about the process from both the businesses’ points of view as well as go over steps that are relevant to a tech-savvy buyer.
These goals can be achieved with a pre-written, custom crawling script or the use of more complex tools, like an Amazon scraper.
It comes with all extensions that are essential for safe and efficient data extraction from the biggest online retailer.
To learn more about what an Amazon scraper can do, check out the product offered by Smartproxy – one of the biggest proxy server providers on the market that offers extra help for all scraping needs.
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What Is Price Intelligence?
Price intelligence involves possessing a deeper understanding of pricing for goods and services across all players in the market.
By knowing how your competitor prices the products, you can introduce cheaper alternatives, add micro-adjustments, or even run a discount.
The most successful retailers have many data collection tools assembling price intelligence information into data sets, which lets them make price adjustments as often as every few minutes.
This ensures that once the client starts to search for a particular product or service, their price and other parameters about the goods make them the most relevant option at all times.
How To Track Prices With Web Scraping
The goal of successful web scraping operations revolves around a steady supply of pricing data. This can be achieved by running multiple bots to collect information from the most relevant targets.
Depending on your market and price sensitivity, the best results are achieved with 24/7 scraping. The data sets are updated in real time, and no changes in competitor pricing go unnoticed.
An effective scraping system opens more doors for automation, where constant updates to pricing data can fuel semi-automated adjustments to your prices, keeping you ahead of the competition.
Data Scraping For Personal Use
While the aforementioned aggressive scraping techniques are most relevant for highly-competitive retail businesses, a tech-savvy internet user can use web scraping tools to discover great deals for niche products and limited edition goods.
With a clear overview of retail sites, reseller marketplaces, and other e-commerce platforms, you can track prices for products and services that pique your interest.
Even better, some users set up warnings when desired goods reach a low enough price, making their purchase a smart decision and even a good opportunity for reselling.
The best example of a market saturated with scraping bots is the sneaker market.
Knowledgeable sneakerheads are always ready to go the extra mile to use the best automation tools to collect data about prices, future product releases and run automated checkouts with parallel connections to secure the purchase.
Price intelligence monitoring helps them uncover dips in pricing for specific sneakers, which opens up opportunities for profitable purchases.
Sneaker Reselling With Sneaker Proxies
For sneaker price tracking and reselling, individuals have to run multiple automated bots at the same time to achieve the desired goals.
For big markets, geo-location changes and scalability are the most important factors that help you track pricing changes in different regions, target multiple websites or split one internet connection into many parallel instances to increase your chances of buying the desired product.
Sneaker proxies are specifically tailored to help collect information and perform other automated tasks for sneaker research and purchases by changing your IP address and geolocation.
With multiple fake identities doing the job for you, proxy servers protect scraping bots and the main address from dangerous exposure.
Why Proxy Servers Are Essential For Data Collection
While their effectiveness varies from market to market, proxy servers protect all data collection tasks.
For goals as sensitive as price intelligence, where the collector needs live data about each competitor, proxies allow us to scale up the operation and target many sites at the same time.
If one IP address gets banned, you can always choose a different identity from the massive proxy IP pool supplied by the best proxy providers in the industry.
Summary
Price intelligence gives companies and business-minded individuals valuable insight into the prices and their changes on retailer websites.
Web scrapers and proxy servers let you store all this information, track trends, and make adjustments that benefit you or your business.
