2. Competitor price monitoring is especially crucial for ecommerce
businesses. Before you even set up a business strategy, it is important
to carry out a pricing analysis. Every effective business strategy is based
on price. You can’t go against your competitors without knowing what
they are charging and why. In case you want to come up with a very
distinct pricing model, you must be able to justify this to your customers.
You cannot defend your unique pricing model unless you know what
other similar businesses are charging.
5. HTTP Programming : You could post HTTP requests on remote
servers of dynamic or static web pages using socket programming
to extract data for competitor price tracking
HTML Parsers: Many sites have databases that dynamically
generate large collections of pages. Web designers use a common
template or script to encode data for a particular category. You could
use such semi-structured data query languages as HTQL and
XQuery to parse HTML pages to retrieve and transform page
content.
6. Regular Expression Matching or Text Grapping: This is the use of
regular expression matching UNIX grep command facilities of such
programming languages as Python or Perl to extract data.
DOM Parsing: This involves the embedding of full-fledged web
browsers like Mozilla browser control with programs to retrieve
dynamic content from client-side scripts. The browser controls will
also parse web pages into DOM tress for the extraction of parts of the
web pages.
7. Web-Scraping Software: You could buy web scraping tools that are
readily available in the market and customize them.
8. easy-to-use reports Data provided in
varied formats such Excel, CSV, MS-
Access, MySQL, MS-SQL, XML, or
JSON.