Parsing Sites! Why Do You Need Price Parsing?
Parsing sites is the collection of information that is publicly available on the site and transforming it into a format convenient for the customer. Since parsing data from a site involves collecting only information available on the site, it is legal to parse sites. Parsing replaces painstaking manual copy-paste work with an automated process.
There are many reasons and purposes for parsing data from a website. For example, online store owners can parse their sites to check if there are items in stock with the quantity indicated on the site or to compare the price on the site with the actual price from the manufacturer. Such parsing and automated comparison process will take no more than an hour, while manual data verification will take several times longer depending on the quantity of goods + during manual verification you should remember about the human factor, which entails inevitable errors, unlike automatic ...
Parsing online stores to compare their products with those of competitors.
What exactly do online stores compare?
The most obvious answer you could think of is competitor prices, perhaps even discounts.
Of course, it is important to track the price and its change - the availability of discounts, bonuses, promotions, product status (top-selling, new, etc.). It is also very useful to have high-quality reports, and most importantly, operational data on changes to quickly respond to an exciting pricing policy.
But pricing isn't the only metric to track. It is also important to follow the description, characteristics, reviews, photos, and videos of the product.
For example, why is product description important for tracking?
I think everyone has come across a situation where the product visually fits and you want to confirm your choice by reading a laconically grounded description of the product, which will convince you that this is the right choice. But in fact, you see one sentence with duplicate information from the title, which upsets you, and you go to another site in search of a quality description.
Or the opposite situation - the description is too huge, without highlighting, paragraphs, solid text and you don't want to read it.
To avoid losing a client, online store owners need to pay attention to all the characteristics of the product and compare with competitors - for this, information is scraped from the site.
Let's add a little about the difference between parsing competitors' prices and price monitoring.
Parsing, as described above, is just a collection of available information, which is useless in itself, and a price monitoring service is already an integrated approach that creates a relationship between data about a customer's product and data that was collected from competitors. The price monitoring service allows you to track the connection of goods in a convenient interface in real-time.
The service solves any errors related to finding the correspondence of the name, code, and other parameters of the product with the product data of other sites.
When using the price monitoring service, you receive a range of services and one of them is parsing. The service guarantees high-quality analysis and a comfortable interface, parsing only collects data and provided it as a file in an unreadable form.
Data parsing is also used to populate a new site with product information. In this case, of course, there is a visible trait of legal parsing and illegal. It will be illegal to copy the description of the goods and post it on your website, especially if it is a unique text that has been certified by a notary and intended for a specific product.
But there are also options when copying the description is legal. For example, you have created a new website for an online pharmacy and you need to fill it up. One of the fields to fill out is a description of the medicinal product, which is an instruction for the medicinal product and is added in printed form to each package. In this case, the owner of the online pharmacy will save a lot of time when filling out, if he uses the services of a parser and copies the instructions from another site, while he will act following the law.
Parsing is used for various purposes and is a means of automating the collection of information, which further helps to analyze the collected information.
There are opinions that it is necessary to protect against parsing, and enterprising programmers take advantage of the lack of understanding of the terms of the IT-sphere.
Yes, people have the instinct to protect everything that is theirs, but in the case of parsing, people should first figure out what exactly they are protecting.
After all, if you look at it, protection from parsing is the protection of information that is posted on the site. Logically, if the information is posted on the site, it is intended for all people, so what's the difference between who and how views it ?! Some - directly on the site, others - through reports.
Perhaps the best defense is to upload a file with a price list and sign the updated date?
Is there any protection against parsing? - This question interests many, including us. Until we met a defense that we could not get around. But do not forget that Z-Price is a team of professionals with many years of experience. We are sure that there are programmers who have faced serious protection and have caused difficulties in overcoming it, and perhaps even remained unbearable. This is a matter of experience and knowledge!
Summing up, I would like to say that parsing is needed for those who need to analyze a large amount of data from a large number of sources.
Those who must always be aware of the latest information.
Anyone who works in a highly competitive area.
The best way to survive in such conditions is to use the complex Z-Price service, which automatically parses sites, processes data sets up links between products and displays information in a convenient panel with functional graphs, charts, and tables that can be downloaded in any format in the form of reports. All these steps are performed without your participation, which allows you not to waste time on monitoring, but only to analyze the result and act in the direction of SUCCESS!