ONLINE PRICE MONITORING
Definition
Online price monitoring is the automated and continuous collection of prices charged by competitors on their e-commerce sites and marketplaces. It relies on web scraping technologies, partnerships with price tracking services, and APIs. It serves as the foundation for any modern competitive pricing strategy and is essential for keeping pace with the digital market.
Why it's important
- Detect competitor price changes in near real time: a price change in the morning can be detected and replicated within the same day.
- Covering a wide range of products: Online monitoring allows you to track tens of thousands of SKUs simultaneously, whereas field monitoring is limited to a few hundred.
- Feeding the algorithms: market intelligence feeds into dynamic and predictive pricing models.
A concrete example
An electronics retailer has set up a price monitoring system tracking 8 competitors and 15,000 SKUs, with updates every 4 hours. The system detects that a competitor has lowered the price of a television from €749 to €699 at 2 p.m. At 4 p.m., the algorithm suggests matching the price to €699 to the category manager, who approves the change. The price is updated on the website at 5 p.m., three hours after the competitor’s price change. Without this monitoring, the delay would have been several days.
How to measure/use it
Online price monitoring combines four components: 1) crawling competitor websites (including handling CAPTCHAs, IP bans, and changes to HTML structure), 2) product matching (EAN, text similarity, images), 3) data consolidation and cleansing, 4) distribution to pricing tools. Vendor solutions integrate these components with SLAs for freshness and coverage, and manage the scalability of monitored sites.
Common Mistakes
- Underestimating the technical complexity: keeping a crawler up to date across dozens of sites is a job in itself.
- Neglecting product matching: a monitoring system with 30% bad matches is useless.
- Confusing the listed price with the price paid: Some websites use personalized dynamic pricing, so the price shown to a web crawler may differ from the actual price.
Learn more
- Research & Data: Price tracking and web scraping as a managed service.
- Solutions: Pricing Analytics featuring a reliable data feed with guaranteed freshness.
- Tip: Integration and Monitoring to Ensure the Reliability of the Monitoring Chain.
- Resources: Check out our pricing FAQ to learn more about web scraping and price monitoring.