If you’re in any way involved in the ecommerce industry, you’ll know the pain – with retailers implementing tons of price changes daily, it’s nearly impossible to keep up. To stay in the loop, you have to monitor prices or additional data like shipping costs or product availability. Luckily, automated web scraping solution providers like Oxylabs are here to save you by helping you gather public data on a large-scale. Yet, there are some issues you may face in the meantime – let’s take a look at them and possible solutions.  

1. Adapting to layout changes

Website layouts highly vary from page to page. Different e-commerce sites store product pricing information in different locations, making it complicated to automatically extract prices from product pages, especially if the layouts change constantly.

Possible risks

Usually, a parser cannot adapt to different website layouts so may need to develop parsers for every single page they want to extract data from. And yet, websites tend to change their existing layouts so you’ll have to take care of your parser.

How can we help?

Oxylabs providers already parsed data in JSON format. Next-Gen Residential Proxies, for example, have an adaptive parsing feature that finds product pricing information regardless of the website layout. E-Commerce Scraper API has an implemented e-commerce parser. Both solutions save companies development time and costs.

2. Collecting pricing data on a large scale

The e-commerce market is dynamic. During sale peak times, pricing information may change even several times a day. Gathering fresh and accurate information requires tools that can collect large scale data whenever needed. It's one of the most common price tracking challenges but advanced data collection tools can help you there.

Possible risks

Depending on seasons, sales, and other factors, sometimes prices change more frequently. Then price scraping intensifies, as you need up-to-date information.

How can we help?

Oxylabs products allow changing the scale of scraping, depending on what you need at the moment. You can collect as many competitors' prices as required, and be sure that your data is still relevant.

3. Getting geo-location based prices

Pricing information varies on different websites, and sometimes depends on geographic location. Even the same product might be sold for different prices depending on a country or currency. So, it goes without saying that you may find it difficult to access data that’s only available in a particular city/country.

Possible risks

The largest e-commerce sites usually provide information based on IP addresses’ location. This way, they make their pricing different for visitors from other countries, which means that in order to collect accurate prices, you’ll need to use high-quality proxies.

How can we help?

Oxylabs’ offers proxies in all countries with city-level targeting. So, you’ll be able to access data regardless of your physical location.

Choose Next-Gen Residential Proxies or E-Commerce Scraper API for price monitoring

You’ve got two possible solutions for scraping publicly-available pricing data. Check out their features to decide which one works best for you.

Next-Gen Residential Proxies

Next-Gen Residential Proxies is an AI-powered solution that shortens the path between data gathering and data analysis.

• Extract public pricing data regardless of website design
• Collect information without blocks or CAPTCHAs
• Monitor prices around the globe

Added benefits of Next-Gen Residential Proxies

Adaptive parsing

Receive parsed price information from any product page.

Wide location coverage

Scrape public data from any desired region.

Auto-retry system

The system does not give up until requests are successful.

E-Commerce Scraper API

Access accurate product data from the top 50 e-commerce marketplaces or standalone shops.

• Pay only for successfully delivered results
• Get real-time highly-localized product data
• Collect pricing information at large scale

Added benefits of E-Commerce Scraper API

Structured results in JSON format

Receive ready-to-use, structured data in JSON format.

Zero maintenance

Forget IP blocks and CAPTCHAs,

Highly scalable and customizable

Easy to integrate, supports high volume of requests.

All in all

If you found this post interesting, please give it a like – it would mean a lot to me. Also, feel free to ask any price-monitoring related questions in the comment section!