The Hotline price parser is software designed for extracting data from the pages of a price aggregator. The Hotline parser can collect prices, product characteristics, information about product availability, customer reviews, and other information depending on the program settings.
The Hotline price aggregator is an online resource that allows online stores and marketplace sellers to post price lists and advertise products on their platform. Hotline helps users choose products and compare prices from several suppliers before making a purchase.
When is Hotline price monitoring useful? How does the Hotline parser work? What to choose: Hotline price parsing or monitoring the entire market? - read about it in this article.
Price aggregator Hotline began its existence back in 2006 and is still the leader among price aggregators in Ukraine. According to https://serpstat.com/uk/ in January 2023, the resource was visited by 8.7 million users. High traffic to a price aggregator is the main factor that attracts online stores, especially newcomers to the e-commerce market, to advertise their products on its site.
Hotline users, as a rule, are already ready to buy, but conduct additional analysis of the terms of sale.
For manufacturers and online stores, this platform is also one of the main services for comparing prices. You can compare Hotline prices manually, but it’s faster and more efficient to use the Hotline price parser.
The Hotline parser will collect the data necessary for analysis for both suppliers and online stores in 10-15 minutes.
The Hotline parser extracts information from the site based on the main key queries - the name of the product. The program visits pages with price lists of product suppliers and can collect the following information:
For online stores, price monitoring with hotline will be useful for:
Hotline price monitoring will allow manufacturers and suppliers:
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 | Flaws |
The ability to immediately monitor the prices of top and medium-sized online stores. | On Hotline there is a 10th part of all online stores in the niche and a selective range. |
Monitoring the emergence of newcomers to the market. | Prices are shown only according to the schedule. |
Inexpensive monitoring option. Any company can afford it. | The correctness of the collection results depends on how correctly the product cards are filled out. |
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.
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.
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