For open APIs this is possible but how to do with the closed ones ?
You can either dissect the inner workings of ajax calls (if the website has any) or write a regular full-page scraper which traverses the product catalog.
Popular choices for scraping are casperjs, beautiful soup, mechanize, etc. Each having its strengths and drawbacks - casper for instance can emulate the browser behavior, while the rest are much less resource intensive but often require going through extra hoops when the website is complicated.
We have some in house technology WCML that we use to mine data on the web. Let me know if we can be of assistance.
Web Scraping has become a pretty common practice on the Internet. There are many different web scraping toolkits now and you can generally get product and price information, as long as it is part of the HTML. In general, you would not do a lot of decisioning at the scrape level but would gather all information in a database and sort from there.
The challenge is that web scraping is dependent on how the web page is structured in the HTML. As the store's pages change over time, you will need to address your scraping.
Your competitor selection should start from the closest, then you can move to a broader market. For that, you can start by creating a list of potential e-commerce platforms that can prove to be your competition. You can include as many competitors as you think are suitable. All the visible competitors are on your list. The whole process of research will help you create a huge list of competitors. Most of the time, e-commerce sites present a huge amount of data to crunch. The complicated part is to extract this data. This way, you can manage the whole price extraction without any hassle. The amount of data is going to be huge. You can go with a third-party storage system to keep your data safe and secure. This will allow you to access the extracted data from anywhere anytime. Following all the above-mentioned steps, you will conveniently gather relevant and valuable price data without spending much time.
You can read more here: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/retailers-guide-to-price-scraping/
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
