eBay price trackers allow people to monitor and track the prices of products listed on eBay over time. Nowadays, there are various eBay price trackers available, both as standalone applications and as features within shopping and deal-tracking platforms.
Are you curious about how these tools can track prices in real-time? The answer is obvious – Most price trackers typically apply web scraping to collect up-to-date price data. Then, users can keep an eye on the price fluctuations of items with the data from the trackers. However, ready-made trackers might not meet every need you have. Creating your own eBay price tracker using web scraping tools must be your top choice if you want one tailored to your needs. In this post, we’ll walk you through how to build an eBay price tracker with web scraping in a no-coding way.
Importance of Tracking eBay Product Prices
Pricing monitoring is an essential part of market research. Businesses can gather information on how their competitors price their products and what price ranges are most effective and competitive. eBay scrapers are the medium for online sellers to make informed decisions about pricing, increase profits, optimize campaign strategies, etc.
Competitive Pricing
Countless products are listed on eBay. Tracking prices of similar or identical items from them can help you stay competitive in terms of price. With the data on product prices, you can analyze which price range is more common or competitive among your competitors, and then adjust your prices in response to market trends and attract more customers to increase sales.
Maximizing Profits
Supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. Price changes reflect the market changes in demand for products. Raising prices when demand is high, and lowering prices to encourage sales during slow periods by contrast, is the key to making profits. You can analyze eBay price data on time and observe the changes in market equilibrium to determine the best time to modify prices to maximize profits with eBay price trackers.
Optimizing Campaigns
Marker conditions can change rapidly. By tracking product prices on eBay, you can identify trends in pricing for specific products or categories, and then make informed decisions about which products to promote. For instance, if certain products consistently go on sale during a specific season, you can plan your promotions and marketing strategies accordingly.
In addition, when you plan to advertise your products via online ads, monitoring eBay prices can help you identify when products are competitively priced and optimize ad campaigns to maximize ROI.
As a form of market research, tracking eBay prices is not only valuable in terms of marketing. It also plays an indispensable role in managing inventory, avoiding price wars, and building brand loyalty. Price monitoring would benefit in staying competitive and responsive to market changes, which can increase your chances of success in the online marketplace.
Getting more marketing strategies for eBay, or you can learn other recommended eBay seller tools to improve your business.
Best eBay Price Scraper – Web Scraping
While tracking eBay prices can contribute to your online business a lot, building an eBay price tracker can be extremely effortless. And a requisite you need for it is a no-coding web scraping solution like Octoparse.
Octoparse can turn eBay pages into structured data with clicks. Almost all product information can be pulled from the pages, including product titles, descriptions, shipping fees, seller ratings, etc., and of course, product prices in this term.
If you are new to Octoparse, you can free download Octoparse and install it on your device first. Then you’ll need an account to log in. Please sign up for an account. Even a free account can unlock most of the functions of Octoparse and let you build eBay price trackers by clicking on your mouse.
4 steps to track eBay price with web scraping
Step 1: Create an eBay price scraping task
Copy the URL of the eBay page you want to scrape product prices from and paste it to the search bar in Octoparse. Then click “Start” to create a new task. After that, the page will be loaded in the built-in browser. It might take seconds to finish loading.
Step 2: Auto-detect eBay product prices
Once the page finished loading, click “Auto-detect webpage data” in the Tips panel. Then Octoparse will scan the entire page and “guess” what data you seek. It’ll highlight all the detected data on the page for you to verify whether the data is what you desire. Meanwhile, you can check extractable data fields in the “Data Preview” panel at the bottom.
Step 3: Create the eBay price tracker
After you’ve selected all wanted data fields, click “Create the workflow” to build the tracker. Next, a workflow will show up on your right-hand side. It tells the steps of the price-scraping process. You can click on each action on this flow chart to check if it runs as intended and add or remove actions based on your needs.
Before launching the scraper, you can rename, delete, and clean data fields in the “Data Preview” panel to ensure you can get more structured data after running the task. It can improve the efficiency of cleansing and analyzing price data.
Tips: You can get price data on both eBay listing pages and product detail pages. Scraping eBay listing pages might be faster, and the process of building the scraper can be easier. By contrast, scraping detailed pages might be a little bit complicated. For more details, please check our guide on scraping data from eBay detail pages.
Step 4: Launch the eBay price tracker and export the data
Click “Run” and select how you like to run the task. You can run the task on your local device or in the Cloud. Because eBay product prices are fast-changing, you might need to scrape such data frequently. Handing over the task to Octoparse cloud servers and scheduling tasks running will be the best choice. You can schedule to run the scraping on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. Then the cloud servers will work for you around the clock.
When the running is completed, you can export the scraped data to local files like Excel, or CSV, or to databases like Google Sheets. Or, you can set up automatic export to get data automatically.
Other 3 eBay Price Tracking Tools
Besides building an eBay price tracker with Octoparse, many alternatives can help you trace product prices on eBay. Here are three highly recommended tools for eBay sellers.
Terapeak
Terapeak is eBay’s built-in seller search which opens to all eBay sellers. Every seller can find Terapeak product research on their seller hub and use it for free. Within Terapeak, you can access years of real-world sales data for millions of items, including the number of listings and items sold for particular items, average sales prices, sell-through rates, sales trends over time, etc.
Check A Flip
Check A Flip is a tool to search current listings and sold items on eBay to find the average new and used prices. You can search for the product you’re interested in on its page, and then it’ll search both live and completed listings and gathers the eBay data in real-time. The search will take up to 60 seconds. Then it’ll feed you the average price of the product for new and used on eBay, the difference between the average prices, the number of products on sale, etc.
Auction Price Finder
The Auction Price Finder is a free APP that allows users to check the current value of any item on eBay. Using it to check a price is simple and fast. You can open the search form and enter the name of the item. Next, tab GO to get the information you need, including the current price trends, the average selling price, the minimum & maximum selling price, etc.
Wrap Up
Because eBay prices change all the time, tracking eBay prices could not be done in one go. Keeping an eye on it can provide first-hand information to modify your pricing strategy and earn more profits. Even though many eBay Price Tracking tools can calculate the scraped data to give you a result rather than feeding you thousands of rows of data, you might not get customized results that meet your certain needs.
Building an eBay price scraper with web scraping can improve such a situation. When you get the raw data, you can clean and analyze the data as you desire and make the most use of it. Follow this post, and give Octoparse a try. We believe your business will absolutely get to the next level.
