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When you hear the phrase “price intelligence”, you may immediately think of a complex system used by large enterprises, or a network of people that gather information about prices. This used to be true a few years ago. Price intelligence is something big corporations do as part of their online market research operations. Today it is used to understand what competitors are doing and how competitive the brand is.
Price intelligence is a lot more accessible now than ever before. In simple terms, price intelligence is the process of collecting information about prices from various sources. Web scraping is the technology that makes price intelligence more accessible, and there are some interesting benefits you can enjoy by giving it a try.
How To Do Price Intelligence
As mentioned before, the simplest way to collect information about prices and special offers is by using a data scraping tool. What it does is collect information from websites – publicly available information – based on parameters that you have defined. A web scraping tool can collect raw data from websites, find relevant parts, and then store those parts in a database.
The sneaker market is huge, and resellers can earn a fortune by using sneaker proxies to snap up limited-edition sneaker releases. Anyone can use the same tactics. Let’s say you are looking for a specific edition of Nike’s Air Jordan. Using web scraping and a Nike shoe bot, you can automate the process of checking whether the specific item is available on popular sneakers websites like Goat. When the item becomes available at the right price, the bot can immediately make the purchase for you.
However, even the best web scrapers and the most reliable Nike shoe bot are susceptible to filters imposed by sneakers websites. This is where a reliable proxy server comes in handy. A proxy server masks your IP address and creates anonymity, allowing the shoe bot to operate without getting your IP address banned. Click here to read a review of a Nike shoe bot.
The rest is easy from there. Once the data is collected, you can choose to create triggers and automate things (as with our Nike shoe bot), process the information to generate insights, or create periodic reports based on multiple web scraping operations. Bots can also use the information to perform certain actions.
Getting The Best Deals
Price intelligence for home users is handy when you are trying to get the best prices under different situations. Regularly purchased items are the best targets for scraping since they are widely available on multiple retailers, they are easy to find, and their prices fluctuate quite frequently.
You can enter the URLs of specific product pages on multiple e-commerce sites into your web scraping tool, and then have price data added to a spreadsheet or an open source database. Once this is set up, you can easily check which retailer offers the best price before making every purchase.
With everyday items like toilet paper, you are looking at up to $5 worth of savings per purchase. That may seem like a small amount, but depending on how often you make the purchase, you can make up to $100 of savings annually.
For more expensive items, price intelligence can be used to time your purchase correctly. Sneakers are, once again, great examples. You may have your eye on a pair, and you know where the pair is available online. You can have the prices on multiple sneakers websites monitored the same way.
When the price is right, you can decide to buy the pair manually. As long as you are not targeting rare and collectible sneakers, a manual purchase is not an issue. For rare pairs, it is best to use a sneakers bot to help you compete with other sneakerheads. Bots can complete purchases in 0.2 seconds, faster than any human can.
Moneymaking Opportunity
The fact that you can get the best prices using web scraping and bots is only part of the equation. The next part is using that knowledge to make money. This too is something that we now see in the sneakers market. A lot of sneakerheads are reselling the rare pairs they landed at launch for several times the retail price.
In fact, the sneakers reseller business is huge with a $2 billion turnover each year. There is a massive market for limited edition pairs too, so the same pair of shoes can be resold several times, each for a healthy margin. A professional, with the right scraper and bot, can easily secure $200,000 in profits per month from sneakers alone.
Thousands of people are doing it and you now have the secrets you need to do it too. You still have to learn about the sneakers market, identify the right pairs to buy, and set up accounts on Goat and other sneakers websites to sell the pairs you want. However, if you are already a sneakerhead, price intelligence is another tool in your arsenal to succeed.
Pricing Intelligence For eCommerce
Of course, there are an abundance of ways to use pricing intelligence technology to support your eCommerce platform. Start off by discovering competitors on major marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. Then, match and compare results in the product catalog. With this information, you can begin to acquire and extract product data. Then, evaluate pricing data, share key metrics, and financial dashboards. This way, you can deliver actionable insights to increase prices, maximize revenues, and encourage repeat buyers. Certainly, pricing intelligence is an excellent strategy to revamp your eCommerce startup.
