How do I track competitors?

[igorprotsenko]

Hello!

I am selling over a 1000 items and want to track competitor offers on each of them. Do you know any tools that can automate this monitoring? So far I just do it all manually for as many products, as I can.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Astaroth]

If they list on aggegator sites like Google Base you could try and consume their XML product feeds to look for pricing changes, new products etc. This wont however pick up on special offers like BOGOF etc

 

[Dmitry]

Igor,

I have also replied to your post on sales factors thread.

I have recently came across a web service, which will be launching soon. Tracks competitive products prices for online retailers, etc. I have signed up for it and waiting to see how it actually looks like. Check out their video at profitero.com - You might be interested as well.

Hope this helps

 

[MartCactus]

Igor,

I have also replied to your post on sales factors thread.

I have recently came across a web service, which will be launching soon. Tracks competitive products prices for online retailers, etc. I have signed up for it and waiting to see how it actually looks like. Check out their video at profitero.com - You might be interested as well.

Hope this helps

You "recently came across a webservice"?

Domain Name:     profitero.com
Registrar:       Name.com LLC

Name Servers:
    NS1.NAME.COM
    NS2.NAME.COM
    NS3.NAME.COM
    NS4.NAME.COM

REGISTRANT CONTACT INFO
ITACCO LIMITED
Dzmitry Vysotski
THE ELM
PARKVIEW
STEPASIDE
DUBLIN
18
IE

I honestly think its better to come to a forum and say that you're involved with it if that is the case. No one will consider it spamming if the site is relevant to what a poster is asking for.

But then again, does anyone have a suspicion that the OP "Igor Protsenko" might be from Dublin too?

 

[TotallySport]

If they list on aggegator sites like Google Base you could try and consume their XML product feeds to look for pricing changes, new products etc. This wont however pick up on special offers like BOGOF etc

The problem with google shopping information is, it isn't the same as on peoples web sites, on many occassions I have clicked on products only to be shown a more expensive prce, and although some are down to VAT, many are not.

If there a better way to collect price information from competitors web sites, I know there is screen scraping, however don't you need to know where the actual price is within the information and program that in? Is there a more dynamic solution, perferable can be coded so I don't have to pay for it except ones to build and a bit of maintanance.

 

[Astaroth]

Hence the suggestion of using a standardised XML feed from the competitors sites that are there for price comparison purposes (eg Google Base).

You can certainly have screen scraping set up but then this must be set up for each competitor and the code may need to be revisited each time a competitor redesigns their layout etc plus if they check their logs frequently they may notice that there is a single IP visiting their site every X days and either checking every product or the same batch of product pages each time - wouldnt be too hard for them to set their site to display a different price for this IP or other counter intelligence techniques

 

[TotallySport]

Hence the suggestion of using a standardised XML feed from the competitors sites that are there for price comparison purposes (eg Google Base).

You can certainly have screen scraping set up but then this must be set up for each competitor and the code may need to be revisited each time a competitor redesigns their layout etc plus if they check their logs frequently they may notice that there is a single IP visiting their site every X days and either checking every product or the same batch of product pages each time - wouldnt be too hard for them to set their site to display a different price for this IP or other counter intelligence techniques

So you actually mean using a comptitors feed and not the actual google shopping API?

Surely they won't like that and just block our IP address

 

[Astaroth]

Of cause it depends on how closely they track their server logs - I would suggest that most don't track them closely at all and a single hit a week/ day (or what ever frequency you check) is going to disappear into the noise much easier than an IP that consecutively hits every product page every week/ day.