Knowing what your competitors are doing is an essential part of running a successful business. In this article, I will show you how you can use web scraping technique to turn data around the web into business insights. Data is valuable only when you translate it into actionable insights.
Why and How
Competitor intelligence is somewhat new, especially to start up companies. There are some very simple things that you need to find out about your competitors: what they sell, where they sell their products, which price they sell their products at. Competitor price monitoring software makes monitoring prices super easy. No matter if you are just a start up or big company, it provide you a easy solution to gain valuable insights by monitoring and tracking.
What Do You Track
. What your competitors are selling.
. Where they sell their products.
. Which price they sell their products at.
Update the prices of your competitors’ catalogs every week, every day or even several times a day. Whether your competitors are on Amazon, e Bay, or other on-line e-commerce stores or any B2C (Business-to-consumer) websites, I think the price monitoring software won’t be very difficult for you to collect data.
How Does It Work
How to keep an eye on your competitors? If you search a product name or a product URL and bulk collect the results from web pages, you will be able to tell at a glance if there’s a pattern, or if the price was lower in the past, by comparing the result you collected before. What do you need to start monitoring prices with Octoparse?
Well, first things first, you need to install the software on your computer. Next, configure an extraction rule for scraping the target e-commerce website.(Crawlers run in Octoparse are determined by the rules configured. The extraction rule would tell Octoparse: which website is to be open; where is the data you plan to crawl; what kind of data you want, etc.)
