Scarping prices is a great way to keep your e-commerce site competitive. In this article, we show 1o ways you can do so without coding or hiring a freelancer.

What is price scraping?

Today’s e-commerce market is extremely competitive and the fact is that if you are an e-commerce retailer then your customer has almost complete price transparency.

Google ads are designed to show product prices with a single click when you search. On top of that, your customer has access to price comparison portals such as pricegrabber.co.uk shopping.com or pricespy.co.uk, or pricerunner.com.

So your customers have access to complete price clarity in real-time. Since many customers make their purchase decision with price as a core parameter, then you need to be as updated on your competitor’s prices as the customers you sell to.

The best and fastest way to do this is to ensure you collect your competitor’s prices in real-time. This makes it possible for you to be competitive on your pricing. To do this you would probably use a price bot.

We will now go through different tactics that you can use for web scraping to improve how you do business.

How to start with web scraping

The first question you need to ask yourself if what your business purpose of doing web scraping is. Are just interested in knowing your competitor’s prices.

Are you interested in how they market and sell their products too? Or are you interested in exporting new possible products to sell?

And if you are interested in your competitor’s prices. Do you need to monitor the prices on a real-time basis, or can it work for you with a less periodic price check?

Also, are you planning to do the price monitoring yourself, or are you planning to outsource the process to a partner? And finally how much are you willing to pay for the services.

Your answers to the question will determine which solution is best for you. We will now go through ten smart ways that you can do product and price scraping.

Top 12 price scraping tools and tactics

There are four different ways you can take to collect prices

With this in mind. Let’s go through the different options for you. We have selected three representatives for each category,

Using scraping bots

Using dedicated scraping bots means that you use a software solution that monitors prices on specific products on specific websites. So they are great if you are an e-commerce store that sells products that others also stock where pricing is one of the market’s core competitive factors. We have selected three such looks.

Scraping bots are also perfect for brands if they need to understand how their products are sold by e-commerce shops. A brand could be interested in this for many reasons such as validation of product demand, monitoring products price life circles and seeing how long their products stay on the market.

Omniaretail

Onmiaretail is one of the most respected price robots on the market.

The core design of the Omniaretail solution is that you can get two different set-ups. One is called “Dynamic pricing” and the other “Price watch”. Dynamic pricing is the part of the solution that tailors e-commerce stores and “Price watch” is designed for brands.

There is no price indication of their services on the website, each customer gets a specific quote.

https://www.omniaretail.com/

Pricefy.io

Pricefy is a direct competitor to Omonaretail. They have two features one that targets the marked space, meaning; who is selling what. The other feature is called “Competitor analysis” where you monitor prices and products on sites you have selected as your core competitors.

They also have an API so you can include the findings into your CRM system.

https://www.pricefy.io/

Prices start from $99 per month.

Camel Camel Camel

Camel Camel Camel is a dedicated tool just for cooling data from Amazon. By using a web price scrapping tool designed for such a unique purpose you are sure to get. They have more than 700.000 users on the platform from all over the world. However many of those are private users and not just businesses users.

The product works as a chrome plugin that you install in your browser. This makes it possible to extract data from amazon pages as you go along. You just activate the plug-in, whenever you need to extract data from a web page.

The plug is free for all to use.

Hire a consultancy firm to do the job for you

If the task of monitoring your competitor’s prices is to fare away from your core competencies, if you feel you need specific domain knowledge, then it could be a good idea to hire an expert.

So we have selected three companies that both do software and consultancy services. In other words, your option to get the competitive package.

Deep Data Consultancy

Deep Data Consultancy is a data consultancy agency that targets enterprise businesses. They have six offices in Europe and the US

Web scraping prices are not their core competencies, that is the manipulation of data. They are on the list because they can help you get an understanding of the data in a different way than what would be possible using out-of-the-box Software As A Service solutions.

There is no price indication on their website for their services, but you could probably expect to pay a market price per hour for their service.

https://deepdataconsultancy.com/web-scraping/

Mindbowser

Mindbwsers business model is very similar to Deep Data Consultancies. However, they have more focus on technology than data. They have a big tech development department. So they would be a great fit if you need to have developed a bespoke solution for you.

There is no price on their website, so expect standard hours for their services.

Web Data Scraping Services

Zyte

Zyte is one of the oldest players in the industry. They have a hybrid business model, meaning they do both data consultancy work and Software As A Service.

The price of the service depends on how your work has been specified and for that reason is not published on their website.

https://www.zyte.com/

Hire freelancers to do the job for you

The big advantage of using freelancers is that you can order a very specific web scraping job whenever you need it, and you don’t have to invest your time and energy in understanding new software solutions.

There are three different freelance core portals that can help you get freelancers to do your price scraping for you, Upwork Freelancer.com and Fiverr.com. The order is straightforward, Upwork has the best and most expensive freelancers, Fiverr, is the cheapest, and Freelancer is in-between.

Upwork.com

Upwork is a portal that contains both freelancers and agencies. The average task starting price is around $2o per hour. Within the Upwork ecosystem, you can find professionals who only get new tasks via the platform.

The freelancer’s bit for your freelance jobs that you submit on the platform, and you then select the one that matches your preferences the best

You pay for the services on a weekly basis via their internal payment processing systems. You should expect to pay around $250 and upwards for an Upwork job.

Freelancer.com

Freelancer.com is the “in-between” Upwork and Fiverr.

Freelancer has 12 million jobs completed compared to Upwork 8 million. So Freelancer is a bigger platform. Generally, jobs on Freelancer have a more one-off concept where you submit a job to be completed and don’t need to engage in a long-term relationship with the seller.

The sellers are often less professional or skilled as is the case of the Upwork sellers. This also means that the prices are lower for a job that you posted on the freelance.com portal.

Expect to pay from $150 and upwards for a Freelancer.com job.

Fiverr.com

The most accessible platform of the three is Fiverr. You can get fairly cheap jobs done here. You should know that the quality of the work that can be ordered on Fiverr can vary quite a lot. Meaning that it is possible to get good people to great work.

But you must not be blind by the fact that there are many fewer professional people on the platform that might not deliver what you expect.

On Fiverr the freelancers specify jobs or service tasks they sell at a given price. It is also possible to get a job requirement, but the norm is to buy a predefined and priced job.

The price of a Fiverr price scraping job starts at about $75.

Configure a web scraper to do the job for you

Kaddara

Kaddara is a one-click collection of online data. The solution has different options that can help you collect competitors’ data.

One way is to set up a bespoke scraping process that collects your competitor’s price and product data. You run this as a job as often as you need it.

The second option is to use the competitor monitor feature. This feature monitors any page or site you wich and notifies you of any changes, such as product feature changes or price changes.

This feature is especially smart if you are a B2B customer who has a few competitors that you need to watch out for.

The price starts at $9 per month.

Bright data

Bright data is a well-known player in the web scraping market. They position themselves as the number one platform for collecting public data. They offer both data sets and collection services.

They are in a different price league compared to tools like Kaddara. Since the Bright Data pricing starts at $350 per month,

https://brightdata.com

Scraper API

Scraper API is mostly focused on the enterprise market. Meaning their solution is designed to integrate directly with your business systems such as your CRM or ERP systems.

This means that you can get data directly into Salesforce, Hubspot, or your Microsoft business suite.

Such a set-up has many advantages as it gives you full market surveillance automation. The drawback is the price and the cost it requires to integrate into your other business systems.

ScraperAPI – The Proxy API For Web Scraping

Conclusion: How to get the most out of your price scraping software?

Web scraping can be a significant boost to your business if done right. Getting price data can be a core parameter in our business. To solve this problem, you need a price scraper. The strategy you choose to do so.

Legal disclaimer

As a rule of thumb, web scraping is legal if done right. Meaning that the price is available online without logging in. However, rules and regulations change in different markets.

So you must always ensure that you are complying with the regulation that applies to your market. Just because a software tool lets you compete in certain operations does not mean that they are always legal in your markets.