With price monitoring tools, you can save yourself the stress of looking up prices of products across multiple e-commerce stores online. Continue reading to discover the best price monitoring tools in the market.
If you have not been leveraging on the price difference of products across e-commerce stores, you are losing money – and not getting the best deal. Likewise, as a product seller, you will need to be competitive, and this means being aware of how much your competitors price the same products you sell.
The thing is, products online are hardly priced the same across stores. Each e-commerce store has its own criteria for setting the price of its products, and this keeps the prices different. As a buyer or seller online, you need to be aware of this fact to help you act accordingly.
However, going from one e-commerce store to another can be tasking. If you even have many products you need to monitor their pricing, it can become impossible to get this done manually. How then do you do this? With the help of price monitoring tools, you can be aware of the prices of products across multiple stores at any given time. Some of the tools even help you decide the best price to set your own product to be more competitive. There are a good number of price monitoring tools in the market. In this article, you are going to discover the best price monitoring tools in the market.
What is a Price Monitoring Tool?
Price Monitoring tools are computer programs that extract price data of products across a good number of platforms. Price monitoring tools are nothing more than specialized web scrapers with a focus on scraping price data.
Some of the price monitoring tools have added functionality and support for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Some do not just provide price data; they also have support for an alert system to notify users of price changes and carry out other tasks.
Why Use Price Monitoring Tools?
Price monitoring tools have their place in the e-commerce industry. They are useful to both sellers and buyers online. Let take a look at why both users and sellers will need them.
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Buyers
Buyers that buy from only one store might be spending more than buyers that buy from a range of sites and will have to look for the best deal. Price monitoring tools can help you check the price of products online so that you know the best deal available. Some of these have alert system to notify users when certain conditionals are met.
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Sellers
Sellers make use of price monitoring tools in other to remain competitive by extracting price data from competitors and using it to set their own prices. E-commerce stores are now embracing dynamic pricing to remain competitive. Price monitoring tools for sellers even have support for determining the best price for a product depending on the price other stores are selling. They make use of machine learning to achieve that.
Best Price Monitoring Tools in the Market
When it comes to price monitoring, you have a lot of options available to you. With coding knowledge, you can even create a unique price monitoring system for your unique use case.
Without coding skills, you will need to look out for tools in the market. There are basically two types of price monitoring tools in the market. These are web scraping tools with price monitoring support and specialized price monitoring tools.
Specialized Price Monitoring Tools
While the above can be used for other web scraping tasks, when it comes to the business of price monitoring, and you really mean business, then you must be ready to pay to use specialized price monitoring tools. Below are some of the best price monitoring tools in the market.
Price2spy
- Pricing: Starts at $19.95 per month
- Free Trials: Yes
- Supported Platforms: Web
Price2spy is arguably one of the best price monitoring tools in the market. One thing you will come to like about Price2spy is that it provides intending customers with 30-days free trial options without providing their credit card details.
Price2spy main features include price comparison, smart spidering, price change alert, reporting, and price analytics. Price2spy will help you identify repricing opportunities, compare prices across stores, and provide you a full market overview. It has support for historical price reporting to help you notice trends.
DataCrops
- Pricing: Varies, need to contact for quote
- Free Trials: Yes
- Supported Platforms: Web
DataCrops is a full data intelligence and aggregation tool. It provides full support for price monitoring and a host of other price intelligence tools, including competitor price monitoring and scraping, hotel pricing intelligence, retail pricing intelligence, flight pricing intelligence, tyre pricing intelligence, and e-commerce price comparison software.
DataCrops has been around for over 12 years now and had done business in over 70 countries. This tool is actually one of the best in the market, but I dislike the fact that the price for the software is not publicly available. You will have to request a quote.
Prisync
- Pricing: Starts from $59
- Free Trials: Yes
- Supported Platforms: Web
Prisync is a competitor price tracking and monitoring software. With this tool, you can see your virals in one UI. How Prisync works are simple. All that’s required from you is to add products and competitors, and the tool will pull out required data from their websites to make you competitive.
Aside from price checking and scraping, Prisync also has support for price matching, MAP monitoring, dynamic pricing, price management, price watcher, and repricing. Prisync. This tool is quite affordable and even comes with a free trial option available.
Omnia
- Pricing: Varies, need to contact for quote
- Free Trials: Yes
- Supported Platforms: Web
Omnia is the product price comparison software for retailers. It provides you with tools that will help you save time while staying competitive and increase the profitability of your business. This software is fully automated and focused more on the area of dynamic pricing.
With this tool, dynamic pricing becomes easy. The tool is flexible and allows you to enjoy some level of freedom. You are to set pricing rules and add price elasticity – and then allow the tool to get the job done for you. Omnia provides a free trial option for intending customers.
Repricer
- Pricing: Start from $79 for a month
- Free Trials: Yes
- Supported Platforms: Web
Repricer is a specialized price monitoring meant for sellers on Amazon. This tool is one of the fastest tools to dynamically price your product. It keeps a tab on your competitors’ prices and automatically changes your pricing accordingly when they make a change to theirs. With this, you can remain competitive on Amazon.
One thing you will come to like about Repricer is that you can exclude low-quality sellers from your competitors' list to make sure you are competing only with the best. With this tool, all that’s required is for you to upload product cost and decide the profit margin.
General Web Scrapers with Price Monitoring Support
General web scrapers are as they sound – they can be used for scraping other data aside from scraping price data. When compared to the price monitoring tools, they are quite cheaper and can be used for other forms of data extraction, aside from the extraction of price data.
Octoparse
- Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySql, SQLServer
- Supported Platforms: Client and web
Octoparse is a popular name in the web scraping market. The tool is a general tool for scraping data from all kinds of websites without writing even a single line of code. Octoparse makes scraping easy by providing templates. Among the templates are templates for scraping product data, including prices from popular e-commerce stores.
Some of the supported sites include Amazon, Walmart, Rakuten, Yahoo Shopping, Bestbuy, Alibaba, 1688, Taobao, JD.com, Bookings, Airbnb, and a good number of other e-commerce stores online. Octoparse is available as both a cloud service as well as a desktop application. Octoparse is a paid tool, but you can enjoy 14 days of free trial as a new user.
Apify Store
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
- Free Trials: Fully functional free account with $5 credit every month
- Data Output Format: JSON, CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, XML, HTML, RSS
- Supported Platform: Web, Cloud, Desktop
Apify Store includes scrapers for online e-commerce stores such as Amazon, Aliexpress, Google Shopping, H&M, Nordstrom, Macys, Etsy, Walmart, Bloomingdales, Tripadvisor, Booking, Airbnb and more. And most of them are free to use. Even better, if the scraper you want isn't already there, you can suggest it, or order a reasonable custom solution.
The Apify web scraping and automation platform features its own pool of intelligently rotating proxies to make scraping online stores more reliable. Apify scrapers are already used by some of the biggest global companies to monitor competitor prices, but Apify’s completely scalable scraping tools mean that anyone can get started easily, no coding needed.
ScrapeStorm
- Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
- Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
- Supported Platforms: Client
ScrapeStorm was built by an ex-Google crawler team. This tool can help you monitor your competitors' pricing or the price of a commodity you need online. ScrapeStorm is AI-powered and makes the whole process of collecting the data easy.
There is also a good number of export formats supported. One thing you will come to like about ScrapeStorm is that it supports task scheduling. It also has support for data deduplication, automatic export, IP rotation, and delay, as well as a speed boost. Their tool is also developer-friendly.
Import.io
- Pricing: Starts at $50 per month
- Free Trials: Yes, 1000 URLs per month
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
- Supported Platforms: Web only
Import.io is one of the fastest-growing software companies in the US, and it is focused majorly on data. With this company, you do not have to worry about data collection as they extract data from the web on a large scale. Import.io has a tool you can use for competitive pricing monitoring with no coding skills required.
Aside from their support for competitive price monitoring, they also offer dynamic pricing service to e-commerce stores that would want to leverage on their data to determine the best price for their products to stay competitive in today’s market. Unlike the tools described above, Import.io does not have support for free trials.
ParseHub
- Pricing: Starts at $149 per month
- Free Trials: Desktop app is free
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
- Supported Platforms:Client and web
If you look at the homepage of the website for this tool, you will see they claim it is a free tool. However, this free tier actually has restrictions that will stand in your way.
To enjoy the tool to the fullest, you will have to opt-in as a paid user. ParseHub can help you scrape data from the most complex as well as the most-outed website on the Internet. This tool is incredibly easy to use, but behind the scene, it is powerful and flexible. With this tool, you can monitor the prices of commodities online as it has support for schedule scraping.
Dexi.io
- Pricing: Starts at $199 per month
- Free Trials: Yes
- Data Output Format: CSV
- Supported Platforms:Web
Dexi.io is a digital commerce intelligence suite. With Dexi.io, you can monitor the price of any product available only easily. But that’s not all. Aside from helping you to monitor the price of products you are interested in, it can also help you carry out other automation tasks on target websites.
The Digital Data Capture Robot is the tool they have provided for the job. Aside from this, they also have support for dynamic pricing and competitor intelligence. With the tools they provide, users of Dexi.io has been able to get incredible results from using their software.
Conclusion
The list above is just a few of the price monitoring tools in the market. There are many others in the market, and if you have coding skills, you can develop one for your use case.
If you are serious about price monitoring and require other features such as alert and dynamic pricing, I will advise you to make use of one of the specialized price monitoring tools. For small marketers and buyers online, you can stick to the web scraping tools with support for price monitoring discussed above.
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