Price Scraping
The problem is that the commercial field has much-scraped data that can be used for business analysis. Different data from e-commerce sites, such as price, stock, rating, and so on, must be scraped, which may then be utilized to track item changes. Price is always moving up the list as one of the critical factors influencing your business competition, which in turn can assist you in assessing the value potential and making major choices. Here we will find a review of the top three free services for scraping prices and a guide on scraping prices from a website.
What Is Price Scraping?
Web scraping to procure prices is known as price scraping and it generally involves scraping price-related information from websites of e-businesses. It is useful by companies for purposes of evaluating competitors’ prices, setting prices, assessing market trends and in the process adjusting the prices they offer in the market as well. Some companies crawl dynamic pricing data in real-time to fine-tune the marketing approach continually.
Although web scraping offers various advantages in terms of cost and market competitiveness, businesses must ensure that they are not breaking the law or breaching the terms of service of the websites from which they scrape information.
Why is Price Data Scraping Not Easy?
But, we cannot scrape all the data with website APIs. Most websites offer an application programming interface for users to interact with part of the website’s data. However, as these sites offer APIs there are some data fields that we were unable to scrape or have no means of authenticating to access.
For instance, you have Amazon which offers a Product Advertising API but which couldn’t offer people a way to scrape everything displayed on the product page such as price and other features. In this case, the only chance to obtain more data, for example, the num_data field of the prices Data, is if one develops one’s scraper by coding or there are special so-called automated scraper tools.
Getting data is not an easy deal even for programmers.
Still, even when we can program on our own, or independently come up with the code or script, in this case using ruby or python, there might be numerous reasons why we could not scrape data. Most likely in most cases we would be banned from scraping some websites because our actions which are scraping seem shady to the site administrators after being repeated within a short time. If this is the case, we may need an IP proxy that allows IPs to leave without the intended targeting sites noting their presence.
The above-explained solutions may make people aware of coding skills and require technical knowledge comparatively higher than existing solutions. Otherwise, it could be rather a problem or even an impossible task for us to solve.
To ensure that scrapping of websites is available for most people I would therefore like to provide several no-coding price scrapping tools that would enable you to scrape price data and other commercial data into structured files with ease.
Top 3 Price Scrapers You Cannot Miss
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is undoubtedly the greatest scraper for pricing scraping. It allows you to scrape almost any website, like Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Priceline, and so on, and take data about the price, reviews, and comments on such platforms. Users do not need to scrape data using code at all, they only need to learn how to configure their tasks and this does not take long.
The configuration of the tasks can be understood well and fast because the interface is clear, and the function is all-encompassing. There is a WorkFlow Designer pane that points and uses drag & drop to include the functional graphical elements. It replicates user browsing patterns and extracts the structure data users require. With this scraper, Proxy IP can be used by setting some Advanced Options only, which is very resourceful effective, and fast. After that, you can scrape data such as price and reviews, which you might require, once the configuration gets over. Still, we have various template scrapers to assist in scraping other kinds of data. Unlike constructing your scraper to acquire what you need, template scrapers will accomplish it for you after you fill out the required information.
Octoparse offers you two simple ways to extract price data. These are the default scraping templates, followed by the customizable crawlers. Both of them are lacking no-coding skills. Other sophisticated operations including IP proxy, cloud scraping, CAPTCHA, etc., can also be performed in Octoparse. The video below explains more about Octoparse and how you can get a free trial by following these steps.
Templates for hot sites of price scraping
The Octoparse comes with pre-installed data scraping templates for famous E-commerce websites; amazon, eBay, Etsy, Flipkart, etc. Using these templates, all you have to do is type in several parameters to begin pulling price information. Here, a simple online price scraper shall be used to extract the price data from Amazon's website.
Process of using Octoparse for scraping of price data
If the above-predefined templates fail to serve your scraping requirements, then you can download Octoparse and create a new account for free, then follow the next steps to create your price scraper.
Step 1: Locate the webpage that you require, and type the URL page from the URL bar which is situated on the home page of the software. Click the “Start” button.
Consider this Amazon URL as an example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NP7JKN6/ref=sbl_dpx_kitchen-blenders_B07SW1QCSR_0.
Step 2: Just make the workflow you want, and then click “Auto-detect web page data”. Wait until the message "Auto-detect completed" appears on the screen.
Scan through the data preview in case you would wish to eliminate any wasteful data field. Then, proceed with clicking on “Create workflow”.
Step 3: Customize the workflow. If you find that the Auto-detection results displayed are not suitable for your needs, then, please do not be worried. Customize the workflow manually: select the data that you need to scrape it, and then simply click on the ‘Extract the text of the element’ button to include them. Confirm that all of the data you require is ready for scraping.
Step 4: Finish the assignment by clicking the "Save" button. You can choose “Run task on your device” if you want to execute that particular task on your PC or choose “Run task in the Cloud” if you want to execute that particular task on the Moretti cloud. It also can schedule the task at any time that you may want.
After all that, it will only take a few seconds for the software to load and read out the data. Octoparse is a web scraping solution that provides everything you need to scrape the data you require.
2. Import.io
It is also known as a web crawler which fulfills all the requirements for different levels of crawling. It comes with a Magic tool that helps to translate a site into a table with no need to organize training sessions. It advises users to download its desktop app if there are more complex sites that have to be scrapped.
After creating your API, they provide several options for easy integration including Google Sheets, Plot.ly, and Excel, using GET and POST. The account is also being offered with Proxy Servers so that the target website cannot identify the user, and as much data as desired can be scraped. All in all, it is not very difficult to use this tool at all, the UI of Import. Furthermore, it is quite user-friendly. In their official tutorials, you can see how you can set up your scraping tasks. When you add that to the fact that this comes with a free-for-life offering and a great support team, import.io becomes the first place to turn to if you are looking for structured data. They also have a paid version, the enterprise level for those large-scale or complex crawl and scrape missions.
3. ScrapeBox
Anyone who does SEO, online marketing, or even spam should know about ScrapeBox. Users can simply scavenge data from a website to grab emails, see page rank, and check for working proxies and RSS submissions. With thousands of rotating proxies, you will be able to sneak onto the competitor’s site keywords, do research on.gov sites, harvest data, and comment with ease without being blocked or detected.
Conclusion
As for these free price scraping tools and easy methods to scrape prices from e-commerce websites, once you know them, you can select the most appropriate one depending on the task at hand. If you are looking for a no-coding price scraper, Octoparse is always your best choice, just download it and find more. If you are wondering how to make the next step higher with lead generation and data enrichment LeadNear can help to become the addition to the tool kit. That is how price scraping along with versatile lead enrichment capabilities makes LeadNear a unique tool that provides you with deeper information on your market and allows for more efficient targeting.
