Competitor Price Check

I could do with an efficient way of checking the price of my competition

[barretta]

We launched a footwear site a couple of weeks ago, the good news is, it's going really well.

What I need is an efficient way of checking my competition's pricing. We sell a particular brand of English shoe, which dosn't appear in Kelkoo or any of the other price checking web sites. There are around a dozen other sites that stock the same brand, the total range is about 100 styles, so checking our prices against the competition is really labour intensive.

Does anyone know of a tool that can help automate this process?

[sun818]

Do your competitors subscribe to any product search engines like Froogle, Yahoo! Shopping, or many of the other smaller niche product engines?

[digitalv]

That's part of the gig, man ... staying ahead of your competitors means taking the time to research them.

In my company, that's a full time job for two people. They literally do nothing but search for and call competitors to get their prices for the same products we sell and log it in a database. Then the sales manager runs a report for the products that are less than our price and determines whether it's something we should drop our price on or not.

There is no "easy" way to do it, and if there WAS a more simple way, (1) EVERYONE would do it and it would do nothing but cut into everyone's profits, and (2) The easy way wouldn't be as accurate because everyone would be doing everything they can to find ways to keep THEIR information *out* of the easy way so no one would be able to set a price lower than them.

Best to hire someone for this than try to do it yourself, if you can afford to. Even having someone come in one or two days a week would be better than doing nothing.

One tip for you ... ebay is a great place to look. You can often find the "lowest price" on ebay, and many times it's not an individual selling an old one, but a company or distributor selling new ones. Then just click through to their website to check out their other products.

[barretta]

I certainly haven't found them on anything like froogle.

As I suspected, looks like it's just going to be a manual slog.

Can't believe it would be impossible to write some code to do this though. At the end of the day, I know which products appear on which pages, and the price of the product is easy enough to spot. While the pages would change over time, at least you would only have to re-configure the code periodically. Anyone got any ideas?

[your_store]

What you're talking about sounds like a simple spider. I've been thinking about automating this process myself, but it's just one of many to-dos.

[sun818]

You can try [google.com...] for new competitors you can track.

[ish]

Programming a spider that 'rips' the info you need from your competitors' sites should be relatively easy.

Or download their entire sites to your HD using a tool like HTTrack and run the spider locally.

I have no idea what the law would think of this kind of activity. It is probably a bit grey, but legal.