Automatic monitoring of prices against manual - a battle with unequal forces

It is no secret that in order to remain competitive and make great profits, websites need to be aware of prices in the market. In turn, it is important for suppliers to monitor the behavior of websites in order to maintain the pricing policy of their products. The solution to these problems is monitoring.

It can be manual and automatic. And in this article we will give these two ways to fight and prove their effectiveness, as well as choose the winner.

Manual price monitoring

To obtain relevant data, it is necessary to involve experienced managers in manual tracking, who are ready to work for a long time and painstakingly. To collect data, they need to scroll through hundreds of pages of Internet sites daily, collect information in Excel spreadsheets or similar resources, and conduct a thorough comparative analysis.

As a result, the amount of work done remains minimal. To save time, information from price aggregators and advertising sites is often used, since the prices for products are grouped to some degree. But no matter how light, attractive at first glance this method seemed, it is crossed out by significant drawbacks:

•  Frequent discrepancy of data due to the placement of information is not from the original source - the site, but from the price lists.
•  Late update and manipulation in price lists from websites.
•  The absence of prices for all necessary products and desired websites and the placement of only a few paid for advertising.

The manual way of tracking prices will certainly work, but it will be successful only for a small company with a small amount of products. But the e-commerce market is developing rapidly. To keep up with the changes, it is worth setting more global goals and thinking about using advanced ways to track prices and control the market.

Automatic price monitoring

This type of tracking is carried out by scanning information from the pages of websites programmatically. Thanks to the use of advanced technologies, it is possible to collect hundreds of thousands of prices from tens of thousands of sites at the same time! You can also automatically collect information at the desired frequency or even continuously.

Of course, there are difficulties. Websites are not always happy to give prices for mass tracking, so they can block the crawling of their sites blocking parsers. But this is not a critical issue. Companies that specialize in automatic price monitoring, depending on their professionalism and work experience, know how to bypass various protections and provide up-to-date information by any means.

One such company is Z-PRICE. Years of experience and knowledge of your business will allow you to always keep relevant data on hand. Moreover, a multifunctional online service will calculate analytics for you and analyze the information collected, and managers will be able to concentrate on performing other important business functions.

In general, the transfer of regular collection of such a large amount of information at the program level and minimizing the human factor guarantees you high accuracy of information, saves time and, most importantly, cuts the budget for salaries of managers and marketers.

Results of the competition

After weighing all the pros and cons, we come to the conclusion that a large online business today cannot flourish without the use of technological means to control the market. Therefore, the victory deservedly goes to automatic price tracking. According to the results of automatic monitoring:

•  Provides more accurate data on the behavior of websites in real time, which makes it possible to make the right decisions at the right time.
•  It has no restrictions on the number of products.
•  Does not need constant monitoring of managers, which significantly saves time.
•  Cheaper and more profitable than manual monitoring.
•  The most effective in building pricing and increasing profits.

Manual tracking is appropriate to apply only for a small amount of products and the number of competitors. At the same time, there are big risks not to stay on the Internet market in the long term, as long as you use the “old proven” methods of manual work, not wanting to change anything, your competitors will have to go many steps ahead using automatic monitoring. The choice is yours!