Parsing competitors' prices and its problems

parsing pricesA competitor price scraper is software designed to collect data on the cost of goods or services from the pages of certain sites - online stores, price aggregators, marketplaces. The price scraper marketplaces settings allow you to scan data at any frequency required by the customer. Parsing results can be generated into tables in Excel or CSV format or transmitted via API.

Checking the prices of competitors is the collection of prices for similar goods or services from the pages of websites of online stores or price aggregators. Competitor prices are parsed regularly, according to a schedule. The purpose of such parsing is to obtain up-to-date information about the prices of competitors in order to create your own pricing system and develop a marketing strategy.

Price scraping

Price scraping is one of the main and effective marketing tools in the e-commerce segment. Let's figure out together what kind of animal it is, and why without it the path to success will be long and thorny

To begin with, let's turn to the definition of the concepts "price parser" and "price parsing"

Price parser is...

A price parser is an IT product (a specially designed computer program) designed to collect data on the cost of goods or services from the pages of sites visited by the parser. This program is able to bypass crawling protection, and has fine settings to collect exactly the information and in the form specified by the customer.
Price scraping is the process of monitoring the prices of competitors or partners, which is performed regularly, according to a schedule. The purpose of price parsing is to obtain up-to-date information to control prices on the market and help the customer optimize their own pricing policy.
Simply put, a parser is software that works under the control of the user, which searches, selects, collects and saves information in a form convenient for viewing and analyzing by the user, and parsing is the automatic collection of the information required by the user from certain Internet resources selected by him.
Most companies actively use scraping, but hide this fact. They treat scraping in the business environment with hostility: "reputable companies do not do such a shameful business." And they themselves quietly buy parsers and keep a whole team of IT specialists to set up and work with this software. The largest players in the Internet sales market, for which, it seems, there are no competitors, regularly monitor the market - parsing rivals and therefore remain in the lead.

If this is acceptable for mastodons, then why are less successful companies embarrassed to use site scraping in their work? It's most likely a misperception. It is perceived not as a gathering of publicly available information useful for business, but as a peek through a keyhole. This phenomenon arises due to the fact that such a tool as parsing, companies began to implement relatively recently, and many still do not fully understand what kind of process it is.
Recently, more and more entrepreneurs have been interested in parsing Internet resources as an effective tool for collecting databases and developing business. Extracting data from competitors' websites will allow you to achieve an advantage in your niche, learn about market trends and consumer demands. First of all, everyone is interested in the prices that are presented on the Internet sites of competitors. To do this, use the price parser.
Often from the pages of competitors' sites companies collect content for their own online resources. For these purposes, content grabbers* are used.
Parsing is not just data collection, but one of the methods of business promotion, since in addition to the prices themselves, the parser can collect promotional offers, the availability of goods from competitors or partners, product reviews and any other information, depending on the software settings. Parsing prices from sites is most effective when the assortment is stable, and Internet sites do not use aggressive methods of protection against crawling.

In other words,

automatic price collection (price parsing) is the optimal software solution for collecting marketing information about the prices of competitors and partners on the Internet. Automatic monitoring of competitors' prices is more expedient than manual collection, since it saves all the company's resources.

For parsing prices from sites, specially developed software is used - price parsers written in various programming languages. In automatic mode, programs bypass websites to collect information about the prices of competitors and partners. The efficiency of the parsers is not comparable to the department of workers involved in monitoring prices manually.
An automated competitor price monitoring program is more beneficial for an online reseller, as it allows you to compare the prices of online stores selling the same products as your company in real time. How your price is more (or less) attractive to customers. In addition, parsing prices in online stores will allow suppliers to control the MAP/ MSRP and promptly respond to dumping.

Price scraper on online stores - automated software that monitors prices on online trading platforms in order to control manufacturers and suppliers compliance with recommended retail prices.
Parsing the prices of online stores is monitoring the prices of partners for manufacturers and suppliers in order to compare them with the MAP/ MSRP. Monitoring results are generated into reports in Excel or CSV formats. Deviation from the recommended retail price up or down is usually highlighted in different colors, which greatly simplifies the process of analyzing the report.

What is parsing for?

Business development tasks for which parsing can be used.

  1. Competitive analysis. Manually browsing dozens or hundreds of competitor sites is quite expensive, it is much easier to run automated scraping.
  2. Own pricing. By parsing prices from competitors' websites, you can track changes in the cost of goods and form your own pricing.
  3.  Audit of your own site. You can parse not only other people's sites, but also your own to clean up deleted pages, incorrect information and any other "garbage".
  4. Copying content. If you need to fill out the product cards of your own online store, you can speed up the process by parsing information from other sites. Of course, all content must be adapted to your own site so as not to get accusations of plagiarism.
  5. Lead generation. With the help of site parsing, you can collect and replenish the customer base.
  6. Collection of databases of installers. When it becomes necessary to find specialists to install equipment in different regions, you can parse advertisements of installers or installers of these regions. Bulletin boards, search results, search engine ad blocks are well suited for parsing.

Parsing functions can be useful for every business.

Automatic price parsing

Automatic price parsing is the collection of prices from sites selected by the user using software that works in automatic mode. The purpose of this procedure is to control prices on the websites of customers and competitors in order to maintain the optimal own price.
To automate the work of marketers in collecting prices from partners and competitors, various types of parsers are used - computer programs written specifically for this purpose.
Parsers in a matter of minutes can bypass hundreds of sites and collect any information of interest to you from their pages. They require a highly technical staff to set up, but this tool is a huge time saver for regular data collection.
Now there is a process of rapid reproduction of trading platforms on the Internet. One well-tuned price parser can replace the work of several employees engaged in manual price monitoring.
There are several ways to automate using parsing.

• Buy a ready-made parser.
• Write a parser for your project.
• Pay for the services of cloud services for parsing prices.

Each of these methods has its pros and cons. I will try to evaluate each of them.

Market price parser - buy ready

There are situations when it was necessary to parse the prices of competitors “for yesterday”. The best solution in this case would be to buy a price parser and customize it for your tasks. 

https://parserok.ru/

https://parserok.ru/

The site parser is designed to collect prices and then display them in an Excel spreadsheet. It was created on VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and presented as an add-in for MS Excel. To parse prices, you need to write a special macro management subroutine.

The site scraper can be used for the following:

   1. Parse prices and other information from websites.
   2. Output data to a table for later export.
   3. Implement an algorithm for transferring data to e-mail or Telegram.

The “pluses” of the parser include the ability to set up a schedule, the ability to parse several data sources at the same time. It is a one-time purchase, but upgrades are available for free. The "cons" include the need for self-configuration of macros, the output of a large array of data only in a tabular format.

https://excelvba.ru/

https://excelvba.ru/

This parser also collects information using Excel macros. On the site, you can select and download a ready-made site parser, or order a parser setup to collect data from your source.

The advantages of this solution include a one-time payment for the parser, the ability to process a large amount of information, the ability to collect and display additional data (promotions, availability, etc.), the ability to collect only selected information (you can update prices for one store, for all at once, or selected ones only). The disadvantages include the need to independently search for links for parsing, paid setup of each subsequent site for data collection, the only format for storing data is an Excel file.

hotline parser or universal parser - write it yourself

If "time suffers" you can order writing your own parser. This can be done by the company's own specialists, or you can resort to the help of freelancers or enter into an agreement with a company that specializes in writing custom parsers.
If you opted for freelancers, I recommend using the services of freelance exchanges. Their big advantage is the security of transactions and available information about the past achievements of the specialist you have chosen.

https://freelancehunt.com/project/napisat-parser-dlya-polucheniya-dannyih/468443.html

order a price parser

If you prefer working with companies, below are examples of some of them with extensive experience writing scrapers.

https://iparser.ru/

https://iparser.ru/

https://catalogloader.com/documentation/eprice

https://catalogloader.com/documentation/eprice

Involving freelancers or third-party companies in writing a parser has one, but a very significant minus. The parser requires regular reconfiguration, since online store sites are dynamic and can make changes to the layout. Practice shows that after the delivery of the order, freelancers evaporate and do not want to bother with its maintenance. In this case, relevant data will be collected by such a parser for no more than 2-3 weeks.

Cloud services for parsing prices or SaaS service

Another option for collecting prices online is to purchase licenses to use cloud-based price parsers.
Price scraping using a SaaS service is a service of a company that provides price monitoring as a ready-made software solution for collecting data from sites of any complexity.
Such services involve flexible settings for data collection, comparison - matching of goods or services from competitors' or partners' websites, generation of reporting and analytical data. Companies that provide this service have extensive experience in collecting any data from Internet sites. They can also collect prices for competitors' products for you. Below I will give some examples of such companies.

Datacol

Datacol

Datacol-powered online store price parser can be tested before purchase. It can be customized directly to your needs. After setting up, you can check the collected data for uniqueness and export it to various CMS formats.
The disadvantages include the rather high complexity of setting up and the cost of setting up parsing if this is done by a Datacol specialist.

https://a-parser.com/

https://a-parser.com/

The advantages of this price parser include high performance, low requirements for computer resources, the ability to set a parsing schedule for several months in advance. It is possible to write a parser for your needs.
The disadvantages include the rather high cost of acquiring a parser and the need to pay extra for updates separately.

Parsing prices from sites on your own - 9 obstacles

Every seller on the Internet wants to have a price for their goods that will make them attractive in the eyes of potential buyers. I have already noted above that most often, this is the lowest price on the market. It is important for online stores to keep the price low, but make it inaccessible to competitors for automatic parsing. After all, as soon as they see these prices, they will immediately reprice their own goods. That is why most online sales companies use some form of protection against automatic parsing of their prices. They are trying to build comprehensive protection that a competitor's marketer cannot bypass without good special training. Here are some of the possible ways to protect.

1. Ban on parsing.
Imagine a situation. You have selected the target sites from which you plan to collect information. But when running the collection program, it turned out that sites forbid parsing through their robots.txt. In this case, you need to get permission from site owners to parse. If permission is denied, it is better to choose other, similar Internet resources. However, it is worth remembering that data posted in the public domain rarely falls under the protection of copyright or related rights. Their privacy can also be questioned. It makes sense to consider whether the ban is legitimate.
2. Updates of site page design.
If the site is created using HTML (HyperText Markup Language - Hypertext Markup Language), the web designer can model the pages according to his own vision, which leads to differences in the structure of sites. Therefore, to collect information from resources with different structures, you will have to create several parsers. Updating the design or adding new features to the site will also require reconfiguring the parser.
If the parser is configured for a certain structure, then after updating it, it will not be able to collect information from the site page. The situation will be even worse if the price parser continues to collect data, but pulls prices from other fields. For example, instead of the current price, it will pull up the old crossed-out price or the price when applying for a loan…
Parsing of prices will provide information, but the conclusions you draw from it will turn out to be false. You may lose profit.
3. Blocking IP addresses.
This is one of the most common methods of protection against parsing. The site turns on IP address blocking when it detects a large number of requests from the same IP. In this case, access to the site may be completely blocked or restricted, which will not allow you to collect all the necessary information. This problem can be overcome with the help of IP proxy services that integrate with automated parsers. The situation will be even more “interesting” if, instead of blocking your IP address, the platform includes issuing deliberately false information to you.
For example, you want to parse the current prices of a competitor, and he issues the recommended retail prices (MAP/ MSRP) of the supplier to your IP address. Price parsing is done, and repricing (repricing your products based on competitor prices) will not give you the expected increase in sales.
4. Access after entering captcha.
Everyone is familiar with the situation when, before entering the desired resource, it is proposed to enter an illegible word or numbers in the field, select one type of image, solve a logical problem, etc. to confirm that you are not a robot. In other words, enter the captcha. CAPTCHA is a fully automated public Turing test to distinguish between computers and humans. People solve test tasks easily, but parsers do not.There are many technologies for bypassing captcha, but the parsing process can slow down. We described in detail all the methods of dealing with automatic price parsing by online sellers in our article “Methods for Monitoring Prices on the Internet”.
5. Trap for the bot (Honeypot trap). Sometimes site owners install special software to obtain information about intruders, the so-called honeypot traps (collectors of information about intruders, which is then used to fight them). As traps, there can be links that a person does not see, but the parser reads. When the parser is trapped, the site receives information, such as an IP address, and can block the attacker. It can also significantly slow down the delivery of its content to the detected bot. It can mix in the result of price parsing a price prepared for such a case (price with MAP/ MSRP or in another currency).
6. Slow site loading speed. Too many access requests to a site can slow down its loading speed. If a person is browsing the site and the download speed has slowed down, it is enough to refresh the page. But the parser in such cases does not know what to do and the parsing process stops. This can lead to a failure to re-evaluate your price list or its complete blocking. In online trading, there are several peaks in sales during the day. At this moment, the maximum number of potential buyers are looking on the Internet for the best offer for the product they are interested in. If your parsing of competitors' prices is late by this moment, repricing of your products is not done, your price does not correspond to the market, customers will go shopping to other resources.
7. Interactive content. Many sites have dynamic content that is developed and embedded using AJAX technologies. It is also called smart content, as it adapts exclusively to the interests and behavioral factors of users. The dynamic content built into the site affects the speed of loading images and scrolling pages, so parsing such resources requires additional settings. To solve such a problem, the site parser must have logic that allows it to imitate the behavior of real users of the Internet site. The developer of such a grabber must be highly qualified, and the marketer who configures it must be familiar with a large number of features of such parsing.
8. Authorization on the site. On some online resources, before you receive information, you will be asked to enter your login credentials - register. After authorization, your web browser creates a cookie value and adds it to your requests on other sites. Thus, the user is identified and gets access to information and services on various resources.
To parse sites that require authorization, you must send cookies along with requests. This is not easy, it requires a high-quality parser and careful and lengthy settings, but it is simply necessary for some parsing tasks. For example, you need to parse prices from a private section of your supplier's portal, or you want to find out the current discounts and promotions of your competitors.
9. Scraping in real time. Monitoring prices and stocks of competitors involves real-time parsing. Frequent data changes can lead to huge profits for some and, conversely, to losses for others. The parser must constantly collect and update data from competitor sites. But the request and delivery of data occurs over a period of time. Parsing a large amount of information in real time can also become a problem.

It is not difficult even for the simplest parser to collect the prices of several hundred products from a dozen online stores. Problems begin when you need to parse the prices of many thousands of items from hundreds of competitor sites. To collect such data arrays, prices are parsed into dozens of streams simultaneously. To receive, store and process these arrays, specialized databases with high speed and high-quality interface are needed.
I am sure that there is no such protection that cannot be bypassed with the experience and skill of parsing. My task was to show what difficulties marketers will have to face when they parse competitors' prices on their own.

Specialized online price monitoring services

There are many monitoring services available online. To use them, the nomenclature must be presented in XML or CSV format and certain parameters must be set (periodicity and regionality). You will receive a report in the form of a table, in which it is convenient to track any price fluctuations and analyze data. Such services help to obtain information about competitors, do not waste the potential of employees on hard routine work, update data at any time and quickly respond to price fluctuations in the market.
Below I will give examples of several services that do automatic online price monitoring.

Price monitoring service "Price Controls"

competitor price parser

The "Price Control" project allows you to find all online platforms that sell the product you are interested in, which is important for protecting your brand on the Internet. It can collect prices from resources of any complexity - online stores, marketplaces, price aggregators. In addition to prices, you can collect data about promotions, discounts, delivery, product availability... It is possible to set up the distribution of information to your partners and customers.Convenient private office.

parsing competitor prices

Convenient personal area.

price parser

The advantages of the service include the possibility of parsing prices both on the links already collected by customers, and the provision of this service by the service. Price Control can perform a comparison - matching - of your products with an assortment of online sites.

What other price monitoring services exist and what are their differences, you can read in our article “Top 5 effective price monitoring services for brands and online retailers.”

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    call centre

    In addition, one of the advantages of this service is the monthly updating of all data collected from online stores for corporate clients. This allows you to find new products that stores have introduced to their pages this month and collect prices for them.

    This service provides the Test Purchase in online stores and marketplaces. With the help of a control purchase, it turns out to find out the channel for the receipt of goods on the Internet. This can be very useful for identifying unscrupulous suppliers in the online sales channel.

    If you buy monitoring services from the Price Control service, then the Control Purchase service will be provided to you at a significant discount.

    https://allrival.com/

    https://allrival.com/

    The advantages of this service include the ability to automatically compare customer products with products on websites, bypass captcha, the availability of an API, and the availability of notifications when prices change. The disadvantages include the need to pay separately for setting up the parsing of each store, which, with a large number of competitors, seriously increases the price of parsing.

    https://7-price.com/en/

    zprice

    The advantages of the service include the presence parsing prices of online stores, comparing them with the MAP and sending letters to violators. The history of price changes is stored in your personal account. Z-PRICE collects data about promotions, discounts and product availability. You can set up a price monitoring schedule, you can transfer monitoring data from the service to the client's accounting system. The disadvantages of the service include an incomprehensible price for monitoring services. The price is set for monitoring 200 online sites, and 150 sites are displayed in reports. Some customers complain about the poor quality of matching their products with the products of online stores.

    https://competera.ai/

    https://competera.ai/

    The advantages of the Competera service include the possibility of pricing for offline and online sellers. They not only monitor prices marketplaces and online stores, but also help customers make pricing decisions.
    The disadvantages are the lack of ready-made solutions for clients in Competera. They customize their platform for each client individually. This is quite long, complicated, requires the collection of a large amount of data from customers and is expensive. Their price tag for the client starts from $1,000 US.

    In my opinion, working with automatic price monitoring services is the best solution for any marketer who is promoting their products on the Internet channel. The disadvantage is that these services are most suitable for companies with a wide range of products and dynamic sales. In other words, for those who need daily monitoring in the fight for clients. However, do not forget that not all companies play by the rules. Many lure potential customers by setting prices lower than those recommended by the manufacturer or importer. These services can help you detect dumping, but not eliminate it.

    How Competitor Price parser Helps Your Business

    Timely and high-quality information about the prices of competitors can seriously increase the competitiveness of any business. Regular collection of prices online makes it possible to timely reprice your goods offered for sale online. Analysis of monitoring prices over long periods of time will allow you to determine their pricing strategies and timely adjust your own. Monitoring the availability of goods on the pages of online stores will allow you to identify limitations in their assortment and earn more on your balances.

    Do you want to know how it works?

    Order a test service






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      info@pricecontrol.biz
      By sending a message, you authorize the collection and processing of personal data.

      Tasks that parsing helps to solveг

      Collecting data from competitors' websites will help your business grow and gain an edge in your market niche. Parsing data can be used to develop your own strategies, study the positive experience of competitors and forecast demand in your industry. For this reason, data analysis has become an important need for entrepreneurs. But the main thing is the effective use of the received data to promote your business.
      In fact, parsing is just a software tool for collecting unstructured data from Internet resources, transforming them into structured data for further processing. So, having received and analyzed parsing data from competitor sites, you can determine their strengths or weaknesses, use useful ideas to adjust your own pricing policy in order to successfully compete in your niche.
      Most often, parsers are used for such purposes:

      Parsing of competitor prices. One of the most sought-after marketing tools for online sellers who monitor the market situation and adapt to changes. If you want to know who, at what price, and what product is selling, then parsing is exactly the tool that will help you find the answer. He is a kind of scout for prices, assortment and promotional offers. The robot (parser) must be able to enter the electronic platform, bypass protection against parsing, find information on the prices of goods and services on the pages, collect it and transmit it in a form convenient for the customer.
      Parsing the prices of online stores is a system task for collecting and transmitting all information about prices in online stores selected by the customer for monitoring.
      However, it should be understood that parsing will not display the volume of real turnover. You can rely solely on publicly available data provided by the online stores themselves. For example, for the convenience of buyers, many sellers display the number of units of goods available for purchase. How realistic these figures are is difficult to judge. Therefore, we can only assume the volume of sales.

      Parsers that collect content to fill sites (content parsing). Special software that collects the description of the product, its price, name, image, composition, specifications and restrictions from the "donor" sites for subsequent upload to your site. Thus, filling the site is several times faster than manually. Such parsers often have the ability to automatically set their own markup and collect information on a schedule. Many people think that scrapers are used to steal content, but in reality they are just an automated collection of publicly available information. Collecting information does not mean using it for unworthy purposes.
      There is a fine line between collecting and stealing information that needs to be understood. For example, parsing and using watermarked images is a direct copyright infringement. But, for example, data from text instruction for a product, or a description of its composition, which is available on each package, is not such. Instead of many hours of manual typing, content for the store will be ready in a few minutes. However, when collecting product descriptions through scraping, you need to be 100% sure that it is not unique and not notarized, otherwise you will be in trouble. Also, in order to avoid content theft, you can connect a synonymizer to the parser. This software automatically replaces words with synonyms while maintaining the main meaning. All that remains to be done is to check the text and the content is ready.

      Parsers for joint purchases. Often, such services are installed on their own websites by manufacturers. Such software allows each visitor to unload the product range directly from the site. These services are very convenient for users, as they have a clear interface, a large number of upload formats, and make it possible to work with both the entire catalog and its individual sections.
      SEO parsers. This is a separate type of software used by SEO specialists for a simpler complex analysis of the site and optimization of its work. These services can be narrow and multifunctional.
      Web scraping for own need is used by firms to identify shortcomings on their own website (incorrect links, duplicate products, lack of a description or image), to structure information for automatic loading, or to help in accounting for goods (comparison of stock balances on the site with stock).
      Parsing prices from supplier price lists is the process of regular systematic collection and subsequent analysis of all price offers of online store suppliers: special and promotional offers, discounts and bonus programs to find the minimum purchase price for similar products. Each online store has dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of suppliers of goods for sale. It is not uncommon for a store to purchase the same product from several distributors. They compete with each other, trying to offer stores the most favorable conditions for the purchase. It is important for an online store to constantly monitor prices and availability of goods from each supplier in order to determine where to buy goods today is most profitable. It is important for the buyer of an online store to see the full picture of the suppliers' offers in a form convenient for analysis and decision making. It is quite difficult, and often impossible, to solve this problem manually or with the help of price parsers. To solve it, it is more profitable to use the products of services that offer a full range of price monitoring of competitors and suppliers.

      The Price Control service has good experience in this matter.
      Also, scraping is used on online bulletin boards to collect numbers and e-mails for phone and email spam.

      The need for data scraping for online business

      Parsing is one of the most effective e-commerce tools. What is its competitive advantage read on.

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        Parsing Benefit #1. Price tracking and comparison.

        Research over the last decade shows that the way to track competitors' prices has become the most popular tool for both online and offline entrepreneurs. The e-commerce market is quite large, and especially the growth has occurred during the pandemic, and conducting such studies manually will require a lot of time and money. Therefore, the data parsing method is actively used by most e-commerce participants. Automated parsing allows you to reduce the time for monitoring competitors and quickly adjust your own pricing strategy in real time according to consumer demand. Simply put, implement a dynamic pricing strategy that will allow an online entrepreneur to increase profits by at least a quarter.

        Parsing advantage #2. Analysis of consumer demand and needs.

        In order to plan its activities in accordance with the needs of the consumer, every business needs to study the wishes of customers. In other words, the seller must offer the necessary goods and services at reasonable prices. Parsing can help with this. It is no secret that many buyers, after purchasing a product or service, go to the site and leave comments. With the help of parsing, you can analyze customer reviews on sites and predict their requests. Customer comments express their mood after purchasing a product or service and their attitude towards the brand as a whole. This data can be used as an indicator of customer demand and preferences. Moreover, all information is in the public domain. There are a number of scraping tools available for extracting user-generated content, analyzing market trends and consumer sentiment.

        Parsing Benefit #3. Upload product descriptions and images.    

        When opening a new online store, either on your own or on a marketplace, you will certainly need descriptions and images of hundreds or even thousands of products. Of course, you can set the task for your employees to download images and descriptions from the manufacturer's website, and then post them on your resource. But this approach is quite expensive, and mistakes are inevitable. Creating new images and descriptions will also take a lot of time. And in this case, parsing will help. Automating the process of uploading images and product descriptions using a parser will speed up the task by dozens of times.

        Parsing Benefit #4. SEO analysis.

        Parsing can be used to increase visibility in search results. The better a site is indexed, the more often it appears in search engine impressions. In this case, scraping will become an effective tool for collecting data to understand which product to invest in in order to get the maximum margin. For example, access to the content of a competitor site will allow you to understand why it is highly ranked by search engines, research keywords and analyze quality queries. This will help you avoid mistakes in SEO promotion of your own site and achieve maximum visibility and impressions in search engines. You can also analyze metadata, keyword density, and titles in descriptions.

        Parsing Benefit #5. Attracting clients.

        The most important goal of any business is to increase the flow of customers. This can be helped by scraping data from social networks and forums where competitors can communicate with customers. This way you can find out what problems consumers face when using a product similar or identical to yours. If your own product has the same problems, you can either fix them yourself or contact the manufacturer and notify them of a manufacturing defect or significant deficiencies. At the same time, a low-quality product can be replaced with a similar one, its advantages and, possibly, a lower price can be widely advertised. Parsing targeted news portals and blogs in your industry will give you an understanding of who reads and writes comments, find interesting data about new products, as well as record your own reviews, offer your own product and talk about exclusive conditions and services. This will help you create a portrait of your buyer and decide on the target audience of your business, for which segment to scale.

        Is parsing of sites - legal?

        So, we can conclude that scraping is an effective tool for extracting useful information from websites about customer requests and preferences and market analysis. Based on the results of parsing, you can get an idea of the methods that competitors use to get good results.
        The legislation of any state prohibits account hacking, DDOS and theft of unique copyrighted content, and what is not prohibited is allowed. Since parsing is not related to any of the points, then it is quite legal.
        Many people confuse parsing with DDOS attacks, which is a mistake. High-quality software (parsers) minimally loads the site of interest without collapsing its work. Often, top sites are of interest, where traffic is several million per month. For such online stores, parsing 1 product name in 2 seconds is invisible. Also, in order not to create a problem and not threaten the work, sites are scraped not every day, but every 3-4 days. This interval is optimal for collecting information and does not overload sites.
        Remember that the automated collection of information that is in the public domain is not punishable by law. A person can view and copy all this information to himself without the help of a parser, just the software will do it quickly and without errors. They can be held liable for the unfair use of the received data. Therefore, you need to treat the materials with intelligence and respect if you do not want to answer to the copyright holder of the content in court.
        Before starting the scraping process, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the content may be protected by copyright. Content can only be controlled by its author. The owner of the content determines its cost, where it can be used and for how long.
        If the content is available for parsing, you need to ensure that the site from which the data is collected remains operational. Site failure due to scraping is an unacceptable violation and may result in penalties for this activity.
        There are cases when parsing can be regarded as unfair competition. For example, one company developed a product, invested resources to promote and attract customers, and another, using parsing, to put it mildly, took advantage of other people's work and created an identical product or service a week later.
        However, most companies use scraping to achieve completely different goals.

        Automatic price monitoring and parsing, is there a difference?

        Let's start with the fact that price monitoring is the most demanded and popular area where parsing is used. However, if parsing is the collection of information from any sites you are interested in. Automatic price monitoring is also a comparison of data. To conduct price monitoring, your site is first parsed, and then competitors or partners.

        Data from your site is compared with information from other sources. You can do this manually if the number of SKUs you are interested in is a couple of hundred, but if the number goes to thousands, then it is better to use matching (automatic matching).

        The right software is only half the success of price monitoring, the other half is setting it up correctly. In order for the matching to always work correctly, you will need to work hard once and double-check the settings manually.

        The matching method (manual or automated) is selected depending on the complexity of the nomenklature.

        Some SKUs from different sites can be compared automatically, while most will require some work.. The fact is that on different sites the name of the same product can be indicated in different ways. Therefore, it is necessary to allocate a certain amount of time for compiling comparative matrices, after which the programs will work automatically.

        Of course, from time to time, it will be necessary to make some adjustments, but this is no longer such a time-consuming and large-scale task as the initial compilation of “bundles” between commodity items.

        Parsing is a complex process that requires regular support from specialists, reconfiguration of the parser and development of additional software tools. Whether you want to actively grow your company and take it to the top or stay at the top of the dynamic e-commerce environment, scraping is inevitable. Whether you are the customer or the target is up to you.

        magnifying glassThe Price Control service is ready to help you in carrying out both price monitoring and copyright protection for unique content. Use the services of professionals and do not waste your time and money on solving scraping problems. All the obstacles associated with parsing, our specialists have learned to bypass, collect high-quality data and to the extent that the client needs to solve the tasks.






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          Alexander Glygalo
          Alexander Glygalo

          Senior software engineer of the Price Control project. Higher education. Studied programming at CNU. Experience in IT - 8 years.

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