Some might think scraping pricing data is like a walk in the park. Except that it isn’t!
It appears deceptively easy until you get into the complexities of extracting pricing data as per your highly customized requirements.
It poses challenges that the most seasoned of companies may find difficult to overcome. Whether it is the website structure or the legality of the scraping, there are intricate challenges on every front.
However, it’s worth overcoming these challenges because it comes with a bundle of benefits. To start with, 85% of ecommerce businesses depend on price scraping for competitor monitoring and optimizing their business strategy.
Studies indicate that companies that leverage price scraping achieve up to 30% better pricing accuracy, resulting in higher market share and improved customer loyalty. As customers tend to compare prices online, having real-time pricing insights is a compulsion anyway.
While price scraping seems like a merely technical issue, it’s much more than that. It’s the key to capitalizing on pricing insights that can boost your business and profits. No matter what the challenge is- tackling anti-scraping mechanisms or endless scrolling- overcoming these challenges can give you a competitive edge in an overcrowded ecommerce marketplace.
Wondering what are the major challenges and how to overcome them?
No worries. We have put together this detailed blog that takes you through the 8 major scraping challenges and how ProWebScraper resolves these challenges in a user-friendly manner. It’s all about turning challenges into business opportunities!
8 Biggest Price Scraping Challenges
1. Anti-Scraping Technologies
Some might think that web scraping tools are all powerful. Why should price scraping pose such a challenge? Well, anti-scraping mechanisms are equally powerful. Websites obviously don’t like bots taking charge of their data.
Hence, they employ tools like CAPTCHAs, IP blocking and rate limiting to resist and restrict scraping.
So it may happen that you will merrily try to scrap prices from Amazon, your requests will either be blocked or you will be redirected to a CAPTCHA page. How irritating would it be? But in all, these anti-scraping mechanisms pose the biggest challenge in price scraping.
2. Infinite Scrolling and Pagination
It’s everyone’s experience. You visit a site. The content loads as you scroll down. Yes, it’s called infinite scrolling.It’s great for user experience in general but a headache for scrapers. If that’s not enough, some sites show you a button “Load More” and make you click on it to show you more content.
If you are a beginner, you will be stuck at this point and quit. Dynamic content can, thus, be a nightmare for scrapers.
3. Scraping Large-Scale Data
As a beginner, you can get hold of a free web scraping tool and scrape bits and pieces of data from here and there. That is fine. But can it work for hundreds of pages to be scraped daily? Doesn’t seem likely.
When one thinks of giant platforms like AliExpress or eBay, the massive data volume can overwhelm your systems or lead to timeouts. Repeated and frequent requests may get their attention so it won’t work beyond a point.
4. AJAX-Based Data Loading
As it is the age of dynamic content, many websites don’t load all the data at once. In fact, they use AJAX to fetch the content in a dynamic way.
If you are going to rely on HTML for your scraping, you will not get all the important data that will be loaded later. So AJAX-based data loading can frustrate basic scraping strategies.
5. Location-Based or Personalized Pricing
Another issue is that prices can vary from one place to another. Many websites alter prices based on your location, browsing history or session.
For example, you can notice the difference in pricing in ride-sharing apps based on your location.
Basic scraping using free tools cannot scrape such personalized pricing. It requires advanced scraping techniques to extract location-based or personalized pricing.
6. Variants and Bundles
Products may appear in isolation on various platforms. But they aren’t. When you explore a mobile phone, it may come across as one product. But these mobile phones come in different colours or specifications in terms of storage etc. or form a part of a bundle.
Some scrapers get hold of the default price and fail to fetch the price of the variants or bundle deals. This will then be incomplete, and hence inaccurate pricing data, leading to wrong pricing comparisons or pricing strategy based on this data.
7. Hidden Data in Javascript
Nowadays, with most websites using React or similar JavaScript frameworks, almost all the content—especially critical data like pricing—is hidden behind script tags or dynamically loaded with JavaScript.
This poses a major challenge for scrapers. Basic scrapers can’t easily access this kind of content because it doesn’t appear in the initial HTML. Instead, it’s loaded after the page has rendered, making it tough to extract pricing details from such JavaScript-heavy sites.
8. Legal and Compliance Issues
Scraping is legal in some ways and yet it can lead to legal trouble,if not done right. Some websites prohibit scraping in their terms of service. There are obviously stringent laws like GDPR and CCPA to take into account if what you are scraping is personal or any kind of sensitive data.
For instance, LinkedIn has exercised legal action against unauthorized scrapers. In short, scraping can land you in legal problems so it is one of the difficult challenges to navigate.
ProWebScraper: The Ultimate Solution to Price Scraping Challenges
Considering the challenges discussed earlier, price scraping is a complex exercise. It cannot be done casually with free tools. Apart from technical challenges, it can also lead to legal issues.
Therefore, if you are planning to scrape pricing data from 100+ websites and do it so consistently and accurately, you need a different set of expertise, skills and experience:
- Industry Expertise: Technical know-how as to how modern websites function, behave and adapt to scraping and use anti-scraping measures
- Robust Proxy Infrastructure: A vast bunch of proxies to bypass anti-scraping tools.
- Anti-Scraping Defenses: Tackling blockers like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Imperva.
- Automated QA: Making sure the data collected is error-free and ready-to-use.
- Legal Compliance: Following the legal norms and website terms to protect your business.
Here’s how ProWebScraper tackles all the challenges effortlessly:
Proprietary Algorithm
- We deploy mobile residential proxies. Our scrapers mimic behavior like mobile browsers to scrape 100% of data accurately.
- Our scrapers tackle all anti-scraping tools like Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, and Imperva without ever getting blocked.
- Automated CAPTCHA-solving ensures hassle-free data collection.
Dynamic Content Handling
- Our software can replicate all the things you do or need to do as a user in a browser- infinite scrolling, form filling, button clicks etc.
- All dynamic content is scraped without fail.
Scalable Infrastructure
- Our cloud infrastructure handles over 1 million+ pages daily without a hitch.
- With millions of proxies, no worries of getting blocked, ever.
Geo-Targeting Expertise
- With proxies in 190+ countries, we can extract data from anywhere. So you can get region-specific data.
- We can even extract pricing data by postcode for websites like Walmart or Instacart, that alter prices and stock based on location.
Legal Compliance
- While we scrape at a scale, we strictly adhere to the laws. We only scrape publicly available data and respect robots.txt and website terms.
- Irrespective of the nature of the project, we never collect private or personal data, ensuring full compliance with GDPR and CCPA.
No matter what your requirement is – competitor price monitoring or MAP compliance monitoring, ProWebScraper effortlessly accomplishes it for you. So you can focus on the most essential of your goals- growing your business.
Think of ProWebScraper as your go-to partner for any kind of data collection.
Book a demo with ProWebScraper today and see how we simplify price scraping for you.
Final Thoughts
Price scraping comes with a bunch of challenges. But if done right with the help of ProWebScraper, it becomes an easy exercise. Once you find a way to tackle the challenges like dynamic content, anti-scraping mechanisms and legal intricacies, you can power your business to a new height and get a competitive edge.
Fortunately, ProWebScraper offers a robust and affordable scraping solution that can handle all these challenges and help you stay ahead of competition!
