Shoppers in today’s age are no longer unaware of where to look for searching and buying a particular product. The millennial shopper is using e-commerce websites like Amazon and Walmart, which has made it easier to compare and find the best product prices in no time.
Among the numerous factors influencing the customer’s purchasing decision, pricing tops the list. While customers struggle with the purchase decision, e-commerce websites wrestle with pricing decisions. Amazon has been dominating the game of price competition in the online marketplace. Amazon has become the undisputed conqueror because of its exceptional pricing strategy through scraping pricing data or price scraping in layman terms.
Two factors taken together can explain the distinguishable price-changing strategy on amazon: speed and number of iterations of price change. In 2013, Amazon made price changes to 40 million products in a day, and this number doubled in the next year. Amazon's competitors couldn't reach even half of this number.
Why Price Comparison is Important?
Price scraping is used by Price Comparison Sites and E-Commerce sites of all sizes and types. It could be a simple Price Scraper using a chrome extension, a python script to scrape data from competing eCommerce websites like Walmart or BestBuy, or a full-fledged web scraping service.
Retailers need to perform continuous price monitoring for several reasons.
First, your competitors can sell the same product at a lower price or offer a more ludicrous discount. But Amazon managed to surpass this barrier by using web scraping and continued price monitoring. So let us understand Amazon's secret formula.
Amazon leverages excellent price scraping to monitor competitors and offers products at competitive prices. According to a Quartz article, Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day
Amazon became the leader in this targeted marketing-driven industry by putting big data analytics to use. They efficiently used web scraping for a lot of different business functions. The business teams were able to predict buyer trends and, therefore, influence customer preferences. Amazon uses price optimization tactics and an enormous amount of data that it collects on users to increase their annual profits by 25%.
If you're a merchandiser, e-Commerce price scraping can help you gain an edge in online merchandising. Businesses need to gather vast amounts of data from various competing e-commerce platforms. The extracted information is stored either as a local file in your computer or a database.
Having insights into your competitor's merchandising plan informs you a great deal about how to build and optimize your plan. Using web scraping and various analysis tools, you can decide which unique products in your arsenal differentiate you from your competitor. A well-rounded online merchandising strategy is about keeping an eye on the entirety of your competitor's catalog and monitoring which products they are adding, removing, or are out of stock.
How to Make Amazon Data Work for You
Business decision-making is a complex process. Business teams struggle to find their competitive edge. Dealers must understand the value of scraping pricing and product data from Amazon. Furthermore, comparing and monitoring it will help you develop a more competitive marketing strategy. Competitor price monitoring can help a brand get an unfair advantage in selling their product at a competitive pricing range.
Let us assume you scraped data using a Price Scraper Tool. The data is then added to a database for analysis. Using tools like PowerBI or Tableau or the open-source Metabase - you can find amazing insights into what it takes to find the perfect price. The coverage and efficiency of your price scraping tool are absolutely critical in scaling the pricing intelligence solution across multiple product lines and more categories.
These analytics tools will also help you improve your product's ranking in the search results. Analysis of Amazon reviews will tell you how effective your ongoing marketing strategy is. Besides, it will help you plan out any required changes in your approach. According to the scraped data, you can determine the demographics of your buyers and accordingly create discounts.
How to use scraped product and pricing data from Amazon
There is a tremendous amount of data with Amazon. Let alone its competitors like Walmart. You can be making a pricing analysis on Amazon for various reasons. Consequently, the factors of your metrics will differ.
Let's help you build an effective competitive price monitoring solution. To start with, you need to set a few ground-level assumptions. For instance, you need to finalize the source of this data (which will be Amazon and a few of its competitors) and the sub-categories. The refresh frequency of each of these subcategories needs to be separately specified.
You also need to be aware of any anti-scraping tools working alongside your source websites. As a result, you can decide the volume of pricing data you need to scrape. In addition to this, understanding the e-commerce data will help you extract precise information. Precise data will smoothen the process.
Channelizing all this work in a specific direction is the first step. That direction is yours to decide, thus adding to the efficiency of the process. Once you have extracted the data, you might want to obtain reviews as well.
You can easily use open source tools like Beautifulsoup for scraping Amazon data or use a service like Datahut to get ready-to-use data.
The data extraction process depends entirely on the structure of the source website. You start by sending a request to the site to which they respond with an HTML file. You parse information from this file. Web scrapers can be designed using many tools.
Many tools can help you in performing price comparisons on Amazon. We'd recommend PowerBI, Tableau, or Metabase if you love open source. Read about the challenges of scraping Amazon data here
Give our services a try!
Indeed, web scraping is a game-changer. At Datahut, we excel at web scraping services for several purposes. To give our data extraction services a try, tell us your data needs, and we'll get you a solution. Get in touch
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