Web parser for the regular control of the competitor’s prices with an automatic goods comparison system. The system notices even short-term dumping of competitors in violation of minimum retail prices. Parser helps to get up-to-date information about the competitors’ offers and products and quickly adjust your price.

Customer goal

Defining a pricing strategy can be challenging due to the resource-intensive process of monitoring and analyzing market trends. Manual checking of competitors’ pricing can’t always provide businesses with insights on short-term dumping or rapid changes. It can lead to customer churn and ineffective marketing strategies. Our customer decided to ensure building the right pricing strategy for his company by implementing a price parser that regularly tracks prices and assortment in an online store of competitors.

Solution

The Exposit team has been developing a web application (parser) for regular monitoring of competitor’s prices with an automatic goods comparison system. The main trick of the project is that the competitor’s site is protected from parsing and the names of the respective products differ from each other.

We created the parser with the following algorithm:

  • The application is configured to monitor the competitor’s prices (available online in the online store) and the frequency of data collection is set;
  • The data is collected regularly, filling the database of the customer;
  • The collected data are compared on the prices and assortment between the nomenclature of our customer’s online store and the nomenclature of the competitor’s one.

Moreover, a goods comparison web application was implemented for the parser’s administrator. For this purpose, we created an algorithm for comparing competitor’s products with the customer’s goods. Users can download the parsing data in .xlsx format for easy sharing and further analyzing. Prices are compared on the basis of the processed data.

This way the Exposit Team fully automated the process of monitoring and comparing prices to help our customer get the relevant insights on market trends and build the most effective business development strategy.