Scrape facility to check retail prices?

[J_A_M_E_S]

I'm working for a company supplying the retail trade and would like to know at a glance what price our retailers are selling our products for online - at a glance, and when this changes.

Ideally, I'd like a system set up whereby a spreadsheet would collate info from around 50 different etailers, telling me the price of around 50 products each (the same products per retailer).

Each sheet of results would be best viewed by product (50 views of the same product by retailer).

If this could update automatically (alert when prices change) that would be brilliant - or would we have to run the script/programme to find this info out each time (not a problem we could do this daily/weekly)?

Is this something that's fairly simple to set-up & manage and freely available? Getting permission from our retailers wouldn't be a problem (if needed) as it will benefit them all (and something they are asking for).

Any help appreciated - and apologies for the basic explanation - as you might guess - not really my area of expertise!

 

[j600com]

The service you're looking for is called competitor price monitoring if you google that phrase you'll find lots of companies who offer this. Be careful though when using these services though as sometimes the data isn't accurate, also scraping some sites without site owner consent could get you in trouble.

I remember a while a go a competitor was doing it on one of our clients sites, we then tweaked the code so it displayed different prices to users from that IP

 

[J_A_M_E_S]

...that's great - thanks for the response and for pointing me in the right direction with regards to terminology of what I actually need!

The retailers we sell to would all be happy to sign up as they all want a level playing field with regards to pricing (note: not price fixing)!

 

[RepricerExpress]

Hi James

If you're scraping from competitors' own sites, then I am not sure how the law stands on that but scraping from Amazon is definitely against their terms and conditions, and as Tim mentions, you have to be careful using that data as its accuracy will be questionable and using it can result in some serious errors.

If you need to check out the competition on Amazon then their new Subscriptions API will definitely help but until repricing software solutions build this right in you might have to manually check out the API integration.

 

[J_A_M_E_S]

...it's definitely not products on Amazon - and the only products I want to check the selling price of are the products we sell to the individual etailers (not products sold to them by our competitors).

Like I say, the etailers will welcome this - but just need an easier way of finding out what price each of our retailers is selling the same product for online!

 

[RepricerExpress]

Ah, I see. I guess Tim has pointed you in the right direction James. Good luck with it sir.