Doing a competitor analysis is crucial as it will give you ideas on how to improve your business.
You should constantly monitor your competitor’s prices to see if they have lowered, raised or stayed the same.
While you can manually check their prices by going to their website and copy and paste, a more efficient and effective way is to have this automated.
Web scraping is commonly used to monitor your competitor’s prices to ensure they stay competitive in the market.
We’ll show you how you can easily monitor your competitor’s prices with web scraping.
Web scraping your competitor’s prices.
To get started, you’ll need to get your competitor’s website, be sure to grab the results page with all of the products on it. You’ll need a page like this to scrape prices more efficiently
Using a web scraping tool or service can get you started in monitoring your competitor’s prices.
Some web scrapers will allow you to set a schedule so that you’re constantly monitoring them without even doing any work
Web scraping services
Using a web scraping service can get your price monitoring spreadsheet set up within just a few minutes. Since you’ll be dealing with a web scraping expert, you’ll know that your project will be set up correctly.
If you just want your data while you focus on other things, then you should choose web scraping services and you won’t have to worry about learning how to use the software. A web scraping expert will be able to scrape a wide variety of eCommerce websites! From bigger websites like Amazon, Walmart and Target, down to smaller websites like Shopify websites.
If you’re looking for a reliable web scraping service, then Parsehub Plus is the best choice! Check out our web scraping services and book a call to talk to us. We offer 1-on-1 support with the same staff that build and maintain the ParseHub web scraper.
Web scrape the prices yourself (for free)
If you want to monitor your competitor’s prices yourself, you can use a web scraping tool like ParseHub, its free to download and can get started right away.
Let’s quickly show you how you can scrape your competitor’s prices without any coding skills!
For this example, we’ll scrape a Shopify website and will be using ParseHub.
- Open ParseHub, click on “New Project” and use the URL from Shopify’s result page. The page will now be rendered inside the app.
- Once the site is rendered, click on the product name of the first result on the page. The name you’ve clicked will become green to indicate that it’s been selected.
- The rest of the product names will be highlighted in yellow. Click on the second one on the list. Now all of the items will be highlighted in green.
- On the left sidebar, rename your selection to “product”. You will notice that ParseHub is now extracting the product name and URL for each product.
- One the left sidebar, click the PLUS(+) sign next to the product selection and choose the Relative Select command.
- Using the Relative Select command, click on the first product name on the page and then on the product’s price. You will see an arrow connect the two selections. You may need to repeat this step to fully train Parsehub what you want to extract.
- Repeat step 5 to also extract the fit style and product image. Make sure to rename your new selections accordingly.
Note: Some bigger Ecommerece websites may block you from extracting data. If you want to avoid this, you can enable IP Rotation which is a paid feature!
Monitor your competitor’s prices today!
Whether you choose a web scraping service or to do it yourself, Parsehub can help you provide a solution for any choice.
With the combination of using our web scraper tool and a team of experts, you can trust that we can set up your price monitoring project correctly and get you the latest data on a schedule.
