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Price Scraping: Free Tools to Scrape Price Data

5 min read

In the commercial field, a large amount of scraped data can be used for business analysis. We can scrape the details, like price, stock, rating, etc., covering various data fields to monitor the change of the items. These data scraped can further help analysts and market sellers to evaluate the potential value or make more significant decisions. In this article, you can learn the 3 best price scraping tools to help your business.

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 scraper tools that can help you scrape any commercial data, including price, stock, and reviews in a structured way with higher efficiency and much faster speed.

Top 3 Price Scraping Software

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is your best choice for web 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.

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.

Steps to Scrape Price Data with Octoparse

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 scrapped

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. 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.

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