Failed Price Checks: The Essential Guide
Doing business in today’s world is very hard, staying on top is even harder. It doesn’t matter what industry we’re talking about, because in all of them there’re many competitors that will do anything to get the customer. They are giving discounts, lowering prices whenever they can just to win the costumers over. It’s impossible to keep up with all of the changes. In order to be aware of them, retailers monitor competitors so that they can plan their next move and fight back. Many of them use price monitoring tools for those reasons, such as Price2Spy. Price2Spy is a tool that allows them to monitor and compare their prices to competitors’, but also helps them reprice products if there have been any changes on the market. The tool will monitor the website and pick up the price of a chosen product and send that information to the client, and then the client can decide about his next step.
But what happens when the tool fails to capture the price. What are the reasons for it and how to resolve those issues?
We’ll dive into all the problems and solutions one by one.
First, quickly to explain what failed price check (FPC) is. It is an error that occurs when the tool isn’t able to pick up the price of a product on a given website. It’s not unusual for them to happen. And there are a couple of different reasons why FPC happen. Here’s the short list:
- The website that is being monitored is very slow;
- The product page has a different structure/design;
- The URL that is monitored doesn’t exist anymore (for example; 404 error showing on the screen);
- The website is not working anymore.
Why does this affect price monitoring? Well, the tool works in a certain way. And if something changes on the websites, there is a possibility that the tool won’t be able to pick up the prices. It’s also possible that the people behind monitored websites are become more tech-savvy and trying to block price checks. Nothing to worry about, we can fight against that.
How do we fix these problems? Simply said, we adapt. We observe what changed and modify what is required in order for prices to be read again. What is important to say is that there are problems that can’t be fixed by us or you. When the product is being discontinued and its URL got deleted, we can’t do anything. Nor can we do anything about websites that are not working. Usually, it’s just temporary issues, and the website will be up and running in no time. But believe it or not, in very, very rare cases sometimes the websites don’t exist anymore. It happens.
And for those who might be interested to know which problem is the most common one. Well, the answer to that question is the fourth one. Some websites don’t work from time to time, they crashed or are under maintenance. This isn’t something that we can influence. Since it’s not yours or ours.
The conclusion is that failed price checks can happen. There is nothing to be panic about it because there is someone who will fix it and you will have up-to-date information in no time. And if the website that you are monitoring is deleted, well you have one competitor to less worry about.
Hope this guide will help you better understand failed price checks and the reasons behind it.
Any questions or comments? Please let us know, we’d be happy to help!
