Hotline Price Parser: a Budget Tool for Competitor Tracking

Hotline price monitoring for manufacturers

Hotline price monitoring will allow manufacturers and suppliers:

1. control prices for your brand's products. Some online stores show the price of the product lower than on their website to attract you to Hotline.
2. identify dumping sellers. Online stores with dumping prices are often advertised on Hotline. The manufacturer/supplier does not need to monitor the entire market to identify them.
3. research market trends to develop a business development strategy. Analysis of demand and supply on Hotline, reviews of the brand’s product, and pricing policy for analogue products will help assess the competitiveness of your own assortment.

Parsing prices on Hotline: advantages and disadvantages

Price aggregator Hotline is a quick solution for comparing prices in dozens or even hundreds of online stores at once. The question arises: “Why monitor the entire market if there is a Hotline?” Small companies most often ask this question and monitor competitors’ prices on price aggregators.

But Hotline price monitoring, like other price aggregators, has both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

          1. Ability to monitor prices of most online stores.

One resource contains hundreds of players with different influences on the market. Collecting prices from Hotline will make it possible to analyze the pricing policy of competitors for the products of interest, and for manufacturers to assess the price level for their brand from partners.

          2. Constant monitoring of the emergence of new online stores.

Placing on Hotline for newly created online stores gives a chance for quick promotion. Also, satellites of existing online stores often appear on the aggregator.

Since Hotline does not control the legality of the sale of a particular brand and compliance with the RRP, this gives newcomers and satellites the opportunity to dump to attract interest to their sites.

There are often situations when the price on Hotline is lower than on the website. This is a violation of the rules of the site, although the aggregator administration does not always respond to complaints. Manufacturers need to track violators on Hotline, since a price reduction on the aggregator will entail price dumping from most sellers on the market. Many online stores monitor pricing on Hotline and build their pricing policy in accordance with the trends of the site.

          3. Budget monitoring option.

If a company has a limited budget, but at the same time it needs to understand market price trends and conduct price analysis based on large volumes of data, Hotline monitoring can solve its problems. The price aggregator monitoring report will collect all offers for the product items of interest to the client.

Despite all the advantages of Hotline price monitoring, there are certain disadvantages.

                        MARKET MONITORING

will allow timely detection and response to the actions of violators.

Flaws

          1. Not all online stores and not all brand items are available on Hotline.

Since Hotline is an advertising platform, not all online stores on the market use its services. Therefore, the representation of sellers of a certain product range can be no more than 10% of the total number on the market. For some industries and brands, there may be no sellers on Hotline at all or they exist in isolated cases. The same story applies to nomenclature. Not all products sold by the retailer are uploaded to Hotline, but are selected based on margin, manufacturer, etc.

           2. Prices are shown irregularly.

To display price lists of online stores, there are certain settings that regulate the display schedule by day of the week. If you conduct daily monitoring of Hotline for a certain item, you will notice that the number of offers changes from day to day. In addition, the retailer’s problems with displays may be due to a simple lack of funds on the balance sheet.

           3. Correctness of data collection.

How accurate the monitoring data is depends rather on the human factor. We are talking about the formation of product cards by aggregator employees. Incorrectly filled out cards, errors in color, size, technical specifications, etc. will already affect the correctness of the conclusions drawn after analyzing the monitoring report.

Hotline price monitoring - conclusions

Whether to parse Hotline prices or monitor the entire market is up to each company to decide, depending on its needs and budget. Hotline price monitoring can be an addition to an already collected price database, which will allow you to see the overall picture of the market. But analytics based only on Hotline price parsing may be erroneous. In addition, among other disadvantages, the price aggregator has protection against crawling. To bypass it, a special program must be built into the parser.

The Price Control price monitoring service uses a parser with built-in software to bypass protection to collect prices from Hotline. For this reason, the data collected by the Hotline parser of the Price Control service will always be correct and up-to-date.