In the commercial field, a large amount of scraped data can be used for business analysis. We can scrape various data from E-commerce sites, like price, stock, rating, etc., to monitor the change of the items.
As we all know, price is becoming a more and more important factor that affects your business competition, which can further help you evaluate the potential value and make more significant decisions. In this article, you can learn about the top 3 free price scraping tools and the step-by-step guide to scraping price data from websites.
What Is Price Scraping
Price scraping is the process of extracting pricing information from various websites, typically e-commerce platforms, to gather data on product prices, discounts, and availability. It is commonly used by businesses to monitor competitor prices, make pricing decisions, track market trends, and adjust their own pricing strategies accordingly. Some companies even scrape dynamic pricing data to adjust marketing strategy in real-time.
While price scraping can offer significant advantages in terms of market intelligence and competitiveness, it is essential for businesses to ensure that their scraping activities comply with legal regulations and the terms of service of the websites they are scraping to avoid potential legal issues related to web scraping and data usage.
Why Price Data Scraping Not Easy
However, we can’t scrape all the data with website APIs.
Some websites provide APIs for users to access part of their data. But even though these sites provide APIs, there still exist some data fields that we couldn’t scrape or have no authentication to access.
For example, Amazon provides a Product Advertising API, but the API itself couldn’t provide access to all the information displayed on its product page for people to scrape, like price and others. In this case, the only way to scrape more data, saying the price data field, is to build our own scraper by programming or using certain kinds of automated scraper tools.
It’s hard to scrape data, even for programmers.
Sometimes, even if we know how to scrape data on our own by programming, like using Ruby or Python, we still couldn’t scrape data successfully for various reasons. In most cases, we probably would be forbidden to scrape from certain websites due to our suspicious repeating scraping actions within a very short time. If so, we may need to utilize an IP proxy that automates IPs’ leaving without being traced by those target sites.
The possible solutions described above may require people to be familiar with coding skills and more advanced technical knowledge. Otherwise, it could be a tough or impossible task for us to complete.
To make scraping websites available for most people, I’d like to list several no-coding price scraping tools that can help you scrape price data and other commercial data into structured files efficiently and easily.
Top 3 Price Scrapers You Cannot Miss
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is your best choice for price scraping. You can use it to scrape many websites, like Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Priceline, etc., and grab information including price, reviews, and comments from these platforms. Users don’t need to know how to code for scraping data, but they do need to learn to configure their tasks which can be done in a short time.
Turn website data into structured Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, and your database directly.
Scrape data easily with auto-detecting functions, no coding skills are required.
Preset scraping templates for hot websites to get data in clicks.
Never get blocked with IP proxies and advanced API.
Cloud service to schedule data scraping at any time you want.
The configuration of tasks is easy to grasp because the UI is user-friendly and the function is powerful. There is a Workflow Designer pane where you can point & drag the functional visual blocks. It simulates human browsing behaviors and scrapes the structured data users need. Using this scraper, you can use the Proxy IP only by setting certain Advanced Options, which is very efficient and fast. Then, you can scrape data like price and reviews, as you need after completing the configuration. However, we do have various template scrapers to help for scraping different types of data. Instead of building your own scraper to get what you want, the template scrapers will do the job for you as long as you fill in the required parameters.
Octoparse provides you with two easy methods to extract price data. One is the preset scraping template, and the other is the customized crawler. Both of them are asking for no-coding skills. Advanced functions like IP proxy, cloud scraping, CAPTCHA solving, etc. can also be used in Octoparse. Watch the video below to learn more about Octoparse, and follow the steps to get a free trial.
Price scraping templates for hot sites
Octoparse provides a set of data scraping templates for popular E-commerce websites, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Flikpart, and others. With these templates, you just need to enter several parameters to start scraping price data. Try the following online price scraper to get Amazon price data.
https://www.octoparse.com/template/amazon-product-details-scraper
Steps to scrape price data with Octoparse
If the preset templates cannot meet your scraping needs, then you can download Octoparse and sign up an account for free, then follow the steps below to build your price crawler.
Step 1: Go to the web page you want to scrape, and enter the URL page you want to scrape in the URL bar on the homepage. Click the “Start” button.
Take this Amazon URL as an example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NP7JKN6/ref=sbl_dpx_kitchen-blenders_B07SW1QCSR_0
Step 2: Create the workflow, and click “Auto-detect web page data”. Wait until you see “Auto-detect completed”. Check the data preview to see if there’s any unnecessary data field you would like to delete. Then, click on “Create workflow” to continue.
Step 3: Customize the workflow. If the Auto-detection results do not match your needs, don’t worry. Customize the workflow manually: click and point to the data that you want to scrape, and then click “Extract the text of the element” to add them. Confirm all the data that you want is ready to be scraped.
Step 4: Click the “Save” button to run the task. You can select “Run task on your device” to run the task on your PC or select “Run task in the Cloud” to run the task in the cloud. You can also schedule the task to run at any time you’d like.
Once all that is done, it will take a few seconds for the software to load and extract the data. Octoparse is a great web scraping tool that gives you all your needs to scrape the data you want.
2. Import.io
Import.io is also known as a web crawler covering all different levels of crawling needs. It offers a Magic tool that can convert a site into a table without any training sessions. It suggests users download its desktop app if more complicated websites need to be crawled.
Once you’ve built your API, they offer a number of simple integration options such as Google Sheets, Plot.ly, and Excel as well as GET and POST requests. It also provides Proxy Servers to prevent users from being detected by target websites, and you can scrape as much data as you need. It is not hard to use this tool at all, the UI of Import. Furthermore, it is quite friendly to use. You can refer to their official tutorials to learn how to configure your own scraping tasks. When you consider that all this comes with a free-for-life price tag and an awesome support team, import.io is a clear first port of call for those on the hunt for structured data. They also offer a paid enterprise-level option for companies looking for more large-scale or complex data extraction.
3. ScrapeBox
SEO experts, online marketers, and even spammers should be very familiar with ScrapeBox. Users can easily harvest data from a website to grab emails, check page rank, verify working proxies, and RSS submissions. By using thousands of rotating proxies, you will be able to sneak on the competitor’s site keywords, do research on .gov sites, harvest data, and comment without getting blocked or detected.
Want to keep an eye on price changes? You can try the price monitoring tools, or use the cloud scraping function to schedule the scraping.
Final Thoughts
After learning about these free price scraping tools and the easy methods to extract price data from E-commerce websites, you can choose the most suitable one according to your needs. Octoparse is always your best choice if you’re looking for a no-coding price scraper. Just download it and discover more.
