Price Monitoring Software: Monitoring the World’s Technically Most Complex Sites
Being a retailer, brand, or eCommerce store owner is a lot less glamorous than it might seem. The everyday routine consists of constantly keeping an eye on the competition.
Luckily, that daunting work is now mostly done with the help of price monitoring software.
But, as you are monitoring the competition, they are trying to hit back by improving their websites. As a result, more and more websites are becoming very technically challenging to monitor.
How then to find price monitoring software that is able to monitor the world’s technically most complex sites?
Let’s start from the beginning.
What is price monitoring and why should you be using it?
Price monitoring is the analysis of competitors’ prices which is used for improving one’s own pricing strategy. The goal is to quickly detect price changes and provide a timely response in order to stay competitive.
Therefore, if you want to have prices that are adjustable to current market conditions, this is a necessary part of your pricing strategy.
In recent years this process has become almost completely automated. While there are still e-businesses that do price monitoring manually, most have turned to use price monitoring software.
As expected, websites are trying to avoid this. Therefore, their functioning is becoming more complex, all with the aim of preventing price monitoring.
How are websites trying to prevent being monitored?
One of the biggest challenges for price monitoring software is that the companies are investing a great amount of time and energy to prevent automated price monitoring on their website. Reportedly, non-human traffic makes up more than half of the whole Internet traffic, thus, it is very clear why websites are trying to find ways to avoid this.
The most common way of trying to prevent this kind of traffic is by constantly upgrading the anti-bot detection mechanism. Different websites have different anti-bot mechanisms which means that a price monitoring software has to analyze them individually. What works for one website, might result in failure with another. Needless to say, the world’s biggest websites have the strongest anti-bot mechanisms which are not easy to avoid.
Can a price monitoring software rise up to the challenge?
Websites keep trying to stop automated price monitoring, but price monitoring software such as Price2Spy keeps finding a solution!
After being present on the eCommerce market for 10 years, Price2Spy has witnessed a lot of market changes. From brands and retailers who did not immediately understand the importance of story monitoring, to the fact that today it is almost impossible to find an e-business that does not use this tool.
All these years we have been listening to the market and keeping up with the changes. This meant continuous improvement – a process that used to work, can suddenly become obsolete and you have to find a new solution. To some, this may seem like a vicious circle, but we at Price2Spy love challenges. This is exactly how most of our features came into life.
In order to conduct continuous and reliable price checks, Price2Spy needs to ensure that monitored websites can not detect our activity.
However, if we’re monitoring hundreds of thousands of products on a site, it’s very likely that the site’s administrator will grow suspicious of traffic created by our servers. That’s when they will probably try to block our traffic – and it’s our task to keep avoiding such blocks.
When we are faced with monitoring the world’s technically most complex sites, our first approach is to try out all the standard ban-avoiding techniques. However, if that approach doesn’t bring results, Price2Spy’s team reaches for the strongest weapon – Stealth IP.
Why is Stealth IP our strongest weapon? Because it’s impossible for websites to detect it!
It enables us to find a way around even the most complex websites, so our clients can continue monitoring prices without hindrance.
But, believe it or not, some websites such as Amazon manage to block Stealth as well! What happened? Amazon has recently made an important upgrade to its anti-bot detection system, which meant that the standard Stealth IP procedure that Price2Spy has been efficiently using on more than 50 other websites, was no longer applicable. It took our IT team around 3 days to understand how Amazon changed its bot detection rules! After that, we had to try out a few solutions, but the result was positive – our price monitoring software was able to continue its work!
As you can see, websites get smarter, but so does Price2Spy! 😉
This is all happening “behind the scenes”. Our clients continue to use the features and reports that they find most useful, therefore, all the hard work stays on Price2Spy and not on them.
Conclusion
Each stage of development has its advantages and disadvantages. A mitigating circumstance at the beginning of this journey was the lack of competition, but on the other hand, e-businesses were still distrustful of price monitoring software. Today, the situation is completely different, and so are our challenges. Monitoring technically complex sites is not easy at all, but such situations teach us the most.
If you also want to learn with us and find more about the pricing strategies of your competitors, we invite you to register for a 30-day free trial period.
Check out why we are the first choice for more than 750 clients worldwide!
