In the commercial field, a large amount of scraped data can be used for business analysis. We can scrape various data from E-commerce sites, like price, stock, rating, etc., to monitor the change of the items.
As we all know, price is becoming a more and more important factor that affects your business competition, which can further help you evaluate the potential value and make more significant decisions. In this article, you can learn about the top 3 free price scraping tools and the step-by-step guide to scraping price data without coding.
What Is Price Scraping
Price scraping is the process of extracting pricing information from various websites, typically e-commerce platforms, to gather data on product prices, discounts, and availability. It is commonly used by businesses to monitor competitor prices, make pricing decisions, track market trends, and adjust their pricing strategies accordingly. Some companies even scrape dynamic pricing data to adjust marketing strategies in real-time.
While price scraping can offer significant advantages in terms of market intelligence and competitiveness, it is essential for businesses to ensure that their scraping activities comply with legal regulations and the terms of service of the websites they are scraping to avoid potential legal issues related to web scraping and data usage.
Why Price Data Scraping Not Easy
However, we can’t scrape all the data with website APIs.
Some websites provide APIs for users to access part of their data. But even though these sites provide APIs, there still exist some data fields that we couldn’t scrape or have no authentication to access.
For example, Amazon provides a Product Advertising API, but the API itself couldn’t provide access to all the information displayed on its product page for people to scrape, like price and others. In this case, the only way to scrape more data, saying the price data field, is to build our own scraper by programming or using certain kinds of automated scraper tools.
It’s hard to scrape data, even for programmers.
Sometimes, even if we know how to scrape data on our own by programming, like using Ruby or Python, we still couldn’t scrape data successfully for various reasons. In most cases, we probably would be forbidden to scrape from certain websites due to our suspicious repeating scraping actions within a very short time. If so, we may need to utilize an IP proxy that automates IPs’ leaving without being traced by those target sites.
The possible solutions described above may require people to be familiar with coding skills and more advanced technical knowledge. Otherwise, it could be a tough or impossible task for us to complete.
To make scraping websites available for most people, I’d like to list several no-coding price scraping tools that can help you scrape price data and other commercial data into structured files efficiently and easily.
Top 3 Price Scrapers You Cannot Miss
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1. Octoparse
Octoparse is your best choice for price scraping. You can use it to scrape price data from most e-commerce websites, like Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Etsy, Priceline, etc., and grab other information including product descriptions, ratings, reviews, and comments from these platforms. Users don’t need to know how to code because Octoparse provides the auto-detecting function and preset templates which help to scrape price data without coding needed.
However, Octoparse also provides advanced functions like IP proxies, CAPTCHA bypassing, cloud scraping, scheduled scraping, and more to help you get precious data or large-scale data.
Turn website data into structured Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, and your database directly.
Scrape data easily with auto-detecting functions, no coding skills are required.
Preset scraping templates for hot websites to get data in clicks.
Never get blocked with IP proxies and advanced API.
Cloud service to schedule data scraping at any time you want.
Method 1: Price scraping templates for hot sites
Octoparse provides a set of data scraping templates for popular E-commerce websites, including Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Flikpart, and others. With these templates, you just need to enter several parameters to start scraping price data. Try the following online price scraper to get Amazon price data.
https://www.octoparse.com/template/amazon-product-details-scraper
Method 2: Scrape price data with Octoparse manually
If the preset templates cannot meet your scraping needs, then you can customize your price monitoring by creating a crawler manually with Octoparse. Download Octoparse and follow the simple steps below to start.
Step 1: Copy and paste the target price page link. Go to the web page you want to scrape, and enter the URL you want to scrape into the URL bar on the homepage. Click the Start button.
Step 2: Set the price data fields. The auto-detection will start, and the price areas can be recognized automatically. Create a workflow after the auto-detection finish. Preview the data fields and make changes by using XPath, setting pagination, adding or deleting data fields, etc. The Tips panel will give you prompts to help you continue.
Step 3: Start scraping price data. After all scraping settings have been checked, you can click on the Run button to start extracting data from the website. You can choose the local scraping mode or the cloud scraping mode to set a scheduled time you want.
Step 4: Download price data into Excel. You can download the scraped data into any format you want, such as Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, etc. The database can also be connected with Octoparse.
Video tutorial: Scrape data at large scale
2. Import.io
Import.io is also known as a web crawler covering all different levels of crawling needs. It offers a Magic tool that can convert a site into a table without any training sessions. It suggests users download its desktop app if more complicated websites need to be crawled.
Once you’ve built your API, they offer a number of simple integration options such as Google Sheets, Plot.ly, and Excel as well as GET and POST requests. It also provides Proxy Servers to prevent users from being detected by target websites, and you can scrape as much data as you need. It is not hard to use this tool at all, the UI of Import. Furthermore, it is quite friendly to use. You can refer to their official tutorials to learn how to configure your own scraping tasks. When you consider that all this comes with a free-for-life price tag and an awesome support team, import.io is a clear first port of call for those on the hunt for structured data. They also offer a paid enterprise-level option for companies looking for more large-scale or complex data extraction.
3. ScrapeBox
SEO experts, online marketers, and even spammers should be very familiar with ScrapeBox. Users can easily harvest data from a website to grab emails, check page rank, verify working proxies, and RSS submissions. By using thousands of rotating proxies, you will be able to sneak on the competitor’s site keywords, do research on .gov sites, harvest data, and comment without getting blocked or detected.
Want to keep an eye on price changes? You can try the price monitoring tools, or use the cloud scraping function to schedule the scraping.
Final Thoughts
Price scraping is an essential strategy for businesses looking to stay competitive in today’s market. With the right tools, you can efficiently track and monitor price data from competitors, analyze market trends, and optimize your own pricing strategies.
The free price scraping tools discussed in this article, including Octoparse, provide great starting points for extracting valuable pricing information. Whether you’re new to web scraping or an experienced user, these tools can help you automate the data collection process and save valuable time.
Start using these solutions today to make more informed pricing decisions and enhance your business strategy.
