How Price Scraping Can Be Used in E-commerce?

Introduction

Price scraping is an important tool, broadly used by the e-commerce companies to be competitive as well as get more sales. Nearly all the e-commerce companies have understood the significance of price scraping like a contestant intelligence activity as well as are searching of the better ways of handling price data scraping. Price matching and scraping helps the e-commerce companies understand the actual selling price of all the products on the competitors’ websites that helps them in tweaking their individual pricing to be competitive. This is also broadly used by established and emerging players that are providing price comparison platforms to the consumers.

Price Scraping Procedure

Price data extraction or price scraping is performed by setting up customized web crawlers for fetching the product information from the competitors’ e-commerce websites.

When the crawling is done, the scraped product data might contain different fields like website name, product name, brand name, and pricing. Then the product data runs through the normalization system for preparing it to do matching. This standardization is very important because the data fields could have symbols, special characters, or numbers – all might create problems during the matching.

At Retailgators, we provide the scraped pricing data through different formats like CSV, JSON, or XML according to your preferences. The crawling frequency could be defined according to your particular requirements and crawling can be completed in the real-time.

How To Do Price Matching?

The next step is price matching, immediately after price extraction and scraping. This makes that possible to automate an entire pricing procedure. A robust matching system is important here because every e-commerce portal would have some negligible differences when comes to product descriptions like brand name and product name.

The pricing matching procedure begins with indexing the extracted data. Indexing could be done on the search engines like Elasticsearch. At this time, data from different websites are provided unique IDs to get identified separately through the matching algorithms. A matching algorithm uses text-matching methods on the accessible input that are extracted product data as well as reference website data. A reference website might be your own e-commerce website because the matching needs to be done against the products on own catalog.

After matching completion, the algorithm gives a matching score to each match it might get. If this score is nearer to 1, it indicates that the match is extremely strong as well as the complemented product data is provided to an output dumping file.

The matches of poor scores are sent to the stage 2 match algorithms where a comprehensive matching can be done. In case, the output is satisfactory, the algorithms send them the output dumping file. Then other matches are rejected as they aren’t dependable enough. Although, the matching procedure is depending on the approximation as well as cannot deal with instances where products or brand names concur or lists have improper data.

Applications Of Pricing Scraping Services

You can use 3 key applications for e-commerce price scraping:

Competitive Pricing

Any e-commerce company needs pricing data from competitors to maintain their price strategy competitive and updated.

Creating A Price Comparison Website

Pricing comparison websites are a go-to destination for the majority of e-commerce shoppers prior to taking any buying decisions online. Pricing data scraping can be utilized to empower the price comparison website.

Research & Analysis

All the market research companies can utilize pricing data extracted from different e-commerce sites to get insights on various niche markets regarding demand, pricing, and accessibility.

Looking to scrape price data from e-commerce websites? Contact Retailgators for eCommerce Data Scraping Services.

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