In an age where data reigns supreme, many people use web scraping to quickly collect information online.
Are you interested in product prices, but don't know how to retrieve this valuable data and information? The price scraping is exactly what you need!
👉 In this article, we explain What is price scraping?.
What exactly is price scraping?
Price scraping involves automatically extracting price data from a website.
Thanks to the price scraping, you can collect valuable information for each product sold:
- ☑️ The price of the product
- ☑️ The SKU or product identifier
- ☑️ Availability (in stock/out of stock)
- ☑️ Shipping costs
- ☑️ Promotions/discounts
- ☑️ The brand
- ☑️ The images
- ☑️ Product description...
How it works ?
Just like with the web scraping, the price scraping uses bots or scripts to automatically visit websites and extract information that interests you.
Depending on your needs, you can program robots to search for and collect price data on specific items (e.g., extract only the price of dresses on a ready-to-wear website).
👉 Basically, the price scraping software behave like a real user: bots browse website pages, identify the data and information to be collected, and then extract it.
The process generally proceeds as follows:
- 🔹 The scraper sends HTTP requests to target web pages (which often respond in HTML)
- 🔹 Next, the scraper analyzes HTML/JSON to extract the data you need (price, product name, availability, etc.). This is called parsing
⚠️ There are also high-performance scrapers who can outright simulate a browser (headless browser) for scraping complex and/or dynamic websites (JavaScript).
What is the difference between crawling and the API?
- 🕷️ Crawling also consists of automatically browsing web pages and following links, but only for the’indexation or the website mapping.
Price scraping can be based on crawling.
- 🧩 The API is a official interface which provides easy access to data and information on a website.
APIs allow you to collect structured data without resorting to web scraping.
Why is price scraping so popular?
In a market where rates are constantly changing, the price scraping has become an essential tool for e-commerce. The data and information extracted allow you to monitor the competition in real time.
👉 Thanks to price scraping, you will be able to adjust your rates and strategy at the right time. This will enable you to stay one step ahead of your competitors!
Price scraping helps you to stay competitive, without having to monitor everything manually.
What are the main use cases for price scraping?
1. Competitive intelligence
Price scraping is a formidable competitive intelligence tool.
👉 Collecting price data allows you to see whether your competitors are lowering or raising their prices.
You can then adjust your own offers accordingly.
2. Dynamic pricing
Price scraping allows you to’adjust your prices automatically according to :
- ☑️ The market
- ☑️ The request
- ☑️ What competitors are doing
- ☑️ Stock, period...
3. Market analysis & trends
👉 Thanks to price scraping, you can define a product or catalog strategy.
By automatically collecting price data, you will be able to:
- ☑️ Detect floor prices
- ☑️ Monitor stock shortages
- ☑️ Identify products that sell well
- ☑️ Keep an eye out for frequent promotions...
4. Identification of unauthorized resellers
👉 Price scraping is effective for spot prices that are too low or non-compliant.
Thanks to price scraping, you can track down unauthorized resellers (those who do not comply with your official terms and conditions of sale).
You will then be able to protect your brand or your distribution channels.
What are the benefits of price scraping?
Using price scraping offers many advantages. With price scraping, you can:
- 💰 Increase your margin: By adjusting your prices correctly (neither undercutting nor overcharging compared to your competitors), you can maximize your profits while remaining attractive.
- 🏆 Strengthen your competitiveness : Position yourself strategically against your competitors to remain visible, relevant, and even the price leader!
- ⚡ Save time: Price scraping allows you to automate the monitoring of your products. You can also monitor dozens or hundreds of products with a single click!
the price scraping also impacts the e-commerce ecosystem:
👉 Price scraping increases competition between websites. This can trigger a price war between companies that must constantly reduce their margins to remain competitive.
How to perform price scraping?
No-Code solutions«
Platforms such as Octoparse allow you to perform price scraping without writing a single line of code. You can find out how it works in our article. full review of Octoparse.
👉 Thanks to no-code solutions (SaaS), You can visually configure data extraction, schedule tasks, and export data and information with just a few clicks.
Custom scraping
Want to have complete control over your price scraping project? You can. create your own scraper using languages such as Python, with libraries such as BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, etc.
👉 The web scraping with Python offers the advantage of being a more flexible and powerful solution for collect price data. However, it does require programming skills.
Proxies and IP rotations
Websites can block bots (via IP address, request rate, CAPTCHA).
👉 But you can get around these blocks by:
- At proxies that enable hide the real IP address.
- The IP rotation which allows change your IP address regularly
Platforms such as Bright Data offer proxies (mobile, residential) and IP rotation to limit blocking. We explain everything in our full review of Bright Data.
Is price scraping legal?
In France, the price scraping is legal if :
- ✅ You only collect publicly available data
- ✅ The data and information extracted are neither personal nor sensitive.
- ✅ You are compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- ✅ You respect the robots.txt file and terms of use (TOU) of the site concerned
- ✅ You do not use no «aggressive» methods» (hacking, server overload, etc.)
As they are displayed on websites, prices generally fall into the category of public data.
❌ UNLESS access to prices requires bypassing a authentication or security measure (such as a login) or if collection is explicitly prohibited in the site's Terms of Use.
👉 In this case, scraping becomes illegal, not necessarily because the data is “private,” but because you are violating a contract (the Terms of Service) or a technical protection mechanism.
Want to know more? We explain everything in our article on the legality of web scraping.
In summary, price scraping is a powerful and effective tool to cope with competition.
And you, what tool do you plan to use for scrape price ? Feel free to share your projects and feedback with us in the comments!
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