You need to do price scraping if you want to scrape pricing data different from websites. This might look easier and only a small technical detail, which required to get handled however, in reality, in case, you don’t identify the best way of getting price values from HTMLs, this could be a headache in the long time.
In this blog, we will show a few examples about how price scraping is important for any business’ success. Then, we will study how to utilize open-source Python libraries.
Why Should You Scrape Prices?
In case, you are starting your journey of web scraping, let’s go through some examples for giving you inspiration about how price scraping could assist you.
E-Commerce Competitor Monitoring
The world of e-commerce has become extremely competitive and noisy. Companies are looking for different ways to increase margins, decrease expenses, as well as show prices, which increase their revenue overall. That is where the competitor price monitoring has a role to play. There are no actual online retail sellers, who doesn’t observe competitor prices every day in some way. Price scraping plays a huge part in this task – scraping real-time data using millions of pricing points regularly.
Brand Monitoring
One more important use case about price scraping is brand monitoring. Whenever your brand gets visible on different online platforms, maintaining price acquiescence for a product is as significant as observing competitor’s pricing. You might ideally wish to extract product pages, which show products and competitor’s product data for making sure that your price strategy is updated. This might help you in establishing competitive prices as well as keep price policy violators checked.
Market Research
You might also need to extract prices in case, you do all kinds of e-commerce market research. In case of a one-time project or a constant one, in case, you extract multiple webpages having various price strings, then it’s important to get a solution for efficiently scrape pricing data.
The Fastest Way of Cleaning Price Strings
At X-Byte, we’ve created our individual open-source library to do price scraping. It is well-capable of scraping currency and price values from raw text strings.
You wish to utilize this library for a couple of important reasons:
- Robust pricing amount as well as currency symbol scraping (tested on more than 900 real-world examples)
- No more fight handling decimal as well as thousands of separators
Install
pip install price-parser
Use
Choose the HTML element having price (in case, you don’t know much about Scrapy or web scraping, just check the Scrapy certification)
>>> price_string = response.css(‘span.price-tag’).get() price_string "22,90 €"
2. Utilize this library for cleaning up the strings
Usually, at that point, you might require to write a customized function to have numeric values from a string. Although with pricing scraper, you just have to import a library as well as utilize the similar function consistently:
>>> from price_parser import Price
>>> price = Price.fromstring(price_string)
Then we can retrieve the amount and currency values using attributes:
>>> price.amount
Decimal('22.90') # numeric price amount
>>> price.amount_text # price amount, as appears in the string
'22,90'
>>> price.amount_float # price amount as float, not Decimal
22.9
>>> Price.currency # currency symbol, as appears in the string
'€'
This library has been verified with more than 900 real-world pricing strings.
X-Byte is Always Ready to Help You
If you think that you require any help in data extraction, contact X-Byte Enterprise Crawling and know more about our pricing intelligence solutions as well as how we can assist you in building your products based on the web data.