A major European B2B holding group uses web scraping to transition from “gut feeling” guesswork to a data-driven pricing strategy, helping its portfolio companies optimize margins and market confidence.
The group is an international holding company managing a large number of B2B merchants across Europe. These companies resell a wide range of products from various producers, including workplace supplies, industrial consumables, and specialty paper products.
The group’s commercial lead acts as an internal consultant, advising these companies on strategic pricing methods and defining the commercial processes they use to manage their market position.
In the B2B merchant sector, pricing is often the most critical variable in securing a sale. Yet, for many companies in the portfolio, determining the “market price” was historically a matter of intuition rather than evidence. Sales representatives frequently relied on anecdotal feedback or “gut feelings,” leading to inconsistent pricing and missed margin opportunities.
The team realized that staying competitive required a transition to quantitative business intelligence. Their mission was to implement a systematic pricing framework across a diverse portfolio of companies by transforming competitor websites into actionable datasets.
The Challenge
Before implementing a dedicated web scraping solution, the group’s companies faced a significant data gap.
“They were just guessing when it comes to market price. They were talking about a market price, but they had no data at all”.
— Commercial Excellence Manager, European B2B Holding Group
This lack of quantitative data created several critical inefficiencies:
| Subjectivity in Sales | Pricing decisions were often driven by the “gut feeling” of individual sales reps |
| Manual Labor Constraints | Gathering competitor data manually using Excel was dismissed as “very, very demanding” and unsustainable for thousands of product SKUs. |
| Lack of Market Confidence | Without a clear view of the competitive landscape, it was difficult for companies to have “pricing confidence” when approaching customers. |
The Solution
The team evaluated a range of available web scraping tools and selected Octoparse based on its user-friendliness and customization capabilities. Because many portfolio companies lack in-house programmers, the solution had to be accessible to non-technical staff while remaining powerful enough to handle diverse competitor sites.
Octoparse offers a user-friendly interface and the flexibility to customize scraping workflows. It provides responsive customer support, making it much faster and easier to get projects set up compared to alternatives.
The current workflow involves:
| Weekly Extraction | The scrapers run every week to capture competitor article numbers, prices, and units. |
| Product Mapping | This data is connected to the group’s equivalent products to ensure accurate comparison. |
| Strategic Pricing Rules | The data is fed into logic-based formulas. For instance, the group might take the median price of three competitors and apply a specific multiplier to establish a “base price. |
| Automation Integration | The group is integrating this data with a pricing SaaS platform to automate the journey from web extraction to live pricing. |
The Outcome
The shift to a data-driven model is transforming how the group’s companies operate. By replacing subjectivity with a logical basis, the company has built a foundation for measurable growth.
Measurable Business Value: The primary impact of this digital transformation is reflected in the bottom line. Based on the manager’s experience, moving to data-driven pricing in a merchant business typically yields a 2% to 4% improvement in profit margins.
Beyond revenue, the solution has provided:
- Operational Efficiency: Automation has eliminated manual data entry, allowing the group to rapidly onboard new acquisitions into the pricing framework.
- Enhanced Pricing Confidence: Companies now have a professional “pricing appearance,” which generally leads to better market volumes.
The group is scaling its data-driven framework across its European portfolio and transitioning to a “hands-off” automated pipeline, integrating competitor data directly into Octoparse via server connections. Ultimately, this approach professionalizes their market presence and boosts “pricing confidence” — proving that in the modern B2B landscape, high-quality data is an essential commodity for sustained commercial excellence.
As she concludes: “Data is one of the most important things in business today… it’s crucial to have solutions like that.”
