Black Friday is one of the year’s most competitive shopping events. Online marketplace prices change every minute. Sellers who track their competitors’ prices have a vital edge. They can quickly adjust their pricing strategies and boost their sales. The fast-paced price changes make it impossible to track manually during this busy shopping event.
Price monitoring needs the right tools and strategies to work well. You’ll learn the quickest ways to track competitor prices in this piece. We cover everything from setting up automated alerts to analyzing your competitors’ pricing data. Smart sellers can pick the best price-tracking software and make better pricing decisions during this significant sales period.
Why Monitor Prices During Black Friday
eCommerce leads the charge in holiday shopping as the digital world transforms during Black Friday. In 2020, third-party sellers scored a soaring win on the platform and generated over $4.8 billion in worldwide sales from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. This performance marked a 60% increase from the previous year.
Importance of Competitive Pricing
Competitive pricing is a vital factor for success in the ever-changing world of e-commerce on online platforms. The marketplace uses sophisticated algorithms that continuously review and adjust product prices based on competition, demand, and market conditions. eCommerce solutions actively match or beat competitor prices to maintain their reputation for offering the best deals, so sellers must observe their prices.
What Price Changes Mean
Black Friday prices aren’t always what they seem. PriceSpy looked at more than 6,100 stores and found something interesting. About 31% of products actually got more expensive from October to mid-November. This is a big deal as it means that 17% of items saw price jumps over 10%. Several product categories stood out:
- Computer components: 18% price variation
- Outdoor footwear: 16% price variation
- Kitchen appliances: 15% price variation
Sellers and consumers need strong price-tracking systems to stay ahead. Retailers typically change their prices throughout the holiday season. The original Black Friday rush drives prices up, but they tend to drop as Christmas approaches.
Amazon’s Role in Black Friday sales
Amazon dominates Black Friday sales, and the numbers show its massive impact:
- Prime members buy products worth $1,400 annually, while non-Prime customers spend $600.
- The platform sells over 1 million toys and 60,000 Echo devices every hour at peak times.
- Shoppers can find early deals up to 10 days before the main event.
What Makes a Good Black Friday Price Tracker?
A good price tracking tool needs these core features:
- Immediate price updates with instant alerts
- Visual charts of past price trends
- Alert settings you can customize
- Ability to track across multiple platforms
- Options for automatic price adjustments
How to Find Black Friday Deals in 2024 Through Web Scraping
Web scraping helps people find and keep an eye on the best Black Friday deals when they want to watch many stores at once. This method lets you gather information, which saves time and makes sure you catch all the short-lived offers. Here are detailed steps to help you set up a system to track Black Friday deals in 2024 using web scraping.
Choose Your Target Websites
To start, pick the stores and online shops you want to watch for Black Friday sales. Big names like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and eBay have some of the top Black Friday bargains for things like gadgets, clothes, and stuff for your home. Focusing on sites where you’re most likely to find deals on products you care about will make the data-gathering process smoother. For each website, see if they have existing APIs that let you access product details and prices. APIs are often more straightforward to work with and more efficient than pulling data from HTML. If there’s no API available, be sure to look at each website’s rules of use and robots.txt file to understand what they allow when it comes to collecting data. This step matters a lot, as some websites don’t allow automated data collection to keep their site running and protect their users’ experience.
Set Up a Web Scraping Tool or Script
After you’ve picked your target sites, you need to decide on the tools for scraping them. Many people like Python for web scraping because it has strong libraries like BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, and Selenium. These libraries help you break down HTML and gather data from websites. If you want a simpler way, you can try no-code or low-code web scraping platforms such as Octoparse, ParseHub, or Crawlbase. These platforms often have ready-made scraping templates and visual interfaces so that you can set up scraping tasks without much coding.
When setting up your scraper, define the specific data you need for Black Friday deals. Key data points typically include:
- Product Name: To identify items and avoid duplicates.
- Price: To monitor price changes and discounts.
- Discount Percentage: To highlight the level of discount compared to the original price.
- Product Availability: Knowing if an item is in stock can be crucial for high-demand products.
- Category or Brand: If you’re looking to monitor only certain brands or product categories, make sure your scraper can filter these.
Schedule Your Scrapes
Black Friday prices change, with some deals lasting just a few hours. To catch all price updates, make your scraper run often. Running it every hour or every few minutes is normal during busy sale times, based on how much people want the product and how often the site updates. You can use tools that work on their own or set up cron jobs on Linux systems to run scrapes without you having to do it yourself. Also, use proxy services or switch your IP address to stop websites from blocking you when they see lots of requests coming in fast. Services like Crawlbase can give you different IPs to use, which helps a lot when you’re scraping big retail sites that try hard to stop scrapers.
Parse and Store the Data
After your scraper collects the data, you need to save it in an organized format, like CSV, JSON, or SQL database. Systematically saving the data lets you examine it and compare prices as time goes by. If you’re keeping an eye on several retailers, you might have to standardize the data to make sure it’s consistent across categories and price formats. For instance, some shops might show prices with taxes added, while others might not. Think about using data-cleaning tools like Pandas in Python to deal with formatting problems, get rid of duplicates, and fill in any missing details so your dataset stays useful and trustworthy.
Analyze for Trends and Best Deals
With your data organized, you can start analyzing it to identify trends and uncover the best deals. Look for patterns like:
- Steady Price Drops: Some products may experience gradual discounts leading up to Black Friday, so monitoring these over time can help you predict the best moment to buy.
- Flash Sales and Lightning Deals: High-demand products may have short-term discounts. By checking data at frequent intervals, you can quickly spot these limited-time offers.
- Category-Specific Discounts: You may find that certain categories, like electronics or apparel, have deeper discounts at specific times. Identifying these patterns can help prioritize which products to buy and when.
- Outliers and Inventory Levels: If certain products are in low stock, you might prioritize purchasing those items first to avoid missing out.
Stay Compliant with Web Scraping Best Practices
While scraping can be beneficial, it’s essential to respect each website’s scraping policies. Some best practices to follow include:
- Respecting Rate Limits: Avoid sending too many requests in a short time. Implement delays between requests to prevent overloading servers.
- Avoiding Login-Protected Pages: If a site requires login credentials, refrain from scraping its private data, as this may violate its policies.
- Using Rotating Proxies and Headers: Many retailers implement anti-scraping technologies. By rotating proxies and setting realistic HTTP headers (such as User-Agent), you can avoid detection and ensure uninterrupted scraping.
Optimize Black Friday Price Tracker with Crawlbase
Getting the best deals on Black Friday can be a daunting task as most merchants entice customers with superlative advertisements and messaging. However, Crawlbase is your best choice for building and optimizing a Black Friday tracker.
You can rely on our Crawling API to scrape massive Black Friday deals without hassles. In addition, this tool makes it easier to scrape dynamic content, giving you the boost ahead of other customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do online stores offer price adjustments during Black Friday?
Online stores do not directly offer price adjustments. However, customers can employ a strategy known as “return and rebuy.” If a product’s price decreases after purchase, you can initiate a return and then repurchase the item at the reduced price.
How do online stores manage competition among sellers on pricing?
They utilize algorithmic repricing tools that employ self-learning algorithms to adjust product prices. These tools do not simply lower prices to match competitors; instead, they consider various factors to determine an optimal price that might not be the lowest but can still secure the buy box.
Why do prices on online stores change frequently?
They employ a dynamic pricing model that adjusts prices frequently, approximately every 10 minutes. This model uses an algorithm that monitors millions of prices both on Amazon and other platforms to ensure competitiveness and to offer the best prices to consumers.
How can I track Amazon Black Friday deals effectively?
Using tools like Crawlbase, which analyzes Amazon’s price history, can be beneficial. This tool provides a comprehensive view of a product’s price changes over time, helping you determine if a Black Friday deal truly offers a significant discount.
