Collecting pricing intelligence is integral for prosperous business benchmarking. Knowing your competitor’s pricing card allows you to price your services and products accordingly. Being competitive gives you an edge over the competition, enabling you to secure and retain reliable clients.
How Can Proxies Be Beneficial for Price Data Scraping?
Pricing intelligence is a central process during data mining. Price scraping provides a strategic avenue for businesses to collect the latest, most valuable pricing info from competitor pages. When you do price scraping on the product pages and review blogs of a competitor, you mine data that’s usable to assign a cost to your existing and soon-to-be-launched products. Price scraping informs the best product pricing decisions. But you’ll possibly face obstacles like cloaking and IP blocking when scraping another website. That’s where the use of price scraping proxies comes in.
Fight Against IP Cloaking
Authoritative websites and blogs have robust IP cloaking measures implemented. IP cloaking can misinform your price scraping decision by damaging screen scraping and providing fabricated, false data instead. When price scraping a website with IP cloaking implemented, you’ll get incorrect information, meaning the scraping process won’t achieve its ultimate goal.
The problem with IP cloaking is that it’s tricky to realize when it occurs. Unless you take measures to bypass IP cloaking, you’ll continuously get false pricing data. Businesses can bypass IP cloaking by utilizing high-end and secure proxy servers. Buy unlimited proxies to be able to hide your IP address and make yourself indistinguishable from a regular visitor. That way, you’ll be able to price scrape from competitors as much as you want to.
Protect Against IP Blocking
Web servers often feel intimated by price scraper bots, ultimately blocking the IP addresses sending the requests. In other words, price scraper bots send thousands of requests within seconds, making the servers sense the presence of bot-triggered activities. In response, the web server will block the IP address of the computer sending the request, altering all price scraping activities. Scrapers revolving proxies’ IP addresses are less detectable, as they change the IP address for every request made.
In other words, rotating proxies assign price scrapers a random IP every time it attempts scraping a competitor’s website. Since they generate an actual IP address that is unique for each request, it’s difficult for the competitors’ websites to block your IP address. Therefore, you can send multiple price scraping requests and garner as much price intelligence as possible.
Track Pricing Trends
Data scraping allows you to make essential pricing decisions by giving insights into the key trends that directly affect pricing. Some product prices change regularly because demand and supply dynamics keep changing. As a business owner, you must understand customized, behavioral, and digital pricing dynamics to avoid overpricing or underpricing your products or services.
Price scraping gives you comprehensive data into the varied pricing dynamics of the industry. Using proxies in conjunction with data scraping tools allows you to gather all the necessary pricing info you need in a veritable manner. Proxies add a shield of defense to the price scrapers, preventing them from getting blocked by the target websites when they send multiple requests.
Increase Price Scraping Speed
Utilizing proxies with unlimited parallel connections can significantly increase your price scraping speed. The proxies enable spreading requests over multiple synchronized parallel connections, and bypassing the target website’s rate limits becomes easier. It also allows your scraper to complete multiple data extraction tasks simultaneously.
Quality rotating proxies auto-assign random IP addresses continually and simultaneously, enabling data scraping from multiple sites, pages, and articles. The rotation of the IP addresses reduces the chances of your scraping getting noticed and blocked. In addition, it scales your price scraping abilities, extracting more data within a limited time.
Conclusion
Lowballing in data harvesting can leave your business uncompromised and stuck. Harvesting quality and valuable data in real time is an investment every business needs to make. Data gives product and service pricing insights, enabling companies to upscale their game to stay competitive and take advantage of the competitors’ client base. Realize that, without proxies, your data scraping attempts won’t thrive for long. Acquiring unlimited proxies is the way to go if you want to ensure your price scraping activities remain stealthy and constant on your competitors’ websites.