ONLINE PRICE MONITORING
Definition
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 sets up price monitoring for 8 competitors and 15,000 SKUs, with updates every 4 hours
The system detects that a competitor has lowered the price of a TV from €749 to €699 at 2:00 p.m.
At 4:00 p.m., the algorithm suggests a price match to €699 to the category manager, who approves it
The price is updated on the website at 5:00 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, textual similarity, images), 3) data consolidation and cleansing, 4) distribution to pricing tools
Vendor solutions integrate these building blocks with SLAs for data freshness and coverage, and manage the scalability of the 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.
Mini FAQ
This monitoring service is based on a reliable product-matching system, which is essential for comparing products that are truly equivalent.
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