“Hi! Is Yieldigo a Data Scraping Tool?”
At Yieldigo, we often receive the question: Does your product do data scraping?
Spoiler Alert: No, we are not a data scraping tool.
Price Management software products like Yieldigo go far beyond data scraping. Essentially, our software allows retail price managers to input the online market research they collected with their data scraping tool(s), into the advanced price management technologies and features of their Yieldigo product. This helps retail business end-users render intelligent, resilient, and accurate pricing strategies, with ease.
In other words, Yieldigo is able to leverage the insights delivered by a data scraping tool. Once implemented, your Yieldigo price management software turns these somewhat reliable and partially handy bits of information from your data scraping tool into weaponized features and pricing techniques. The reliable figures, tested results, and other outputs you render with a price management software like Yieldigo helps retailers yield an extremely reliable and truly actionable pricing strategy, with the end goal to help protect margins and improve business results overall.
Data scraping is certainly an important piece of the pricing strategy puzzle, one that pairs perfectly with a full price management product. Most of our clients input their data scraping research into their Yieldigo solution in order to obtain the most reliable results for their business. As a matter of fact, if your retail business is to rely on a well thought out and resilient pricing strategy in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive environment, data scraping will indeed be essential.
Data Scraping: A Piece of the Retail Price Management Puzzle
Your data scraping tool renders valuable research data from the internet. The research data scraping tools can provide to a retail organization is one of many possible inputs–one puzzle piece of many–that can help improve your success with a price management tool. As a matter of fact, there are various data inputs necessary during your Yieldigo price management software implementation process (we will take a look at this later in the article).
Before we proceed, it’s important that we understand the basics: your data, your solution, and the opportunities and responsibility that come with it.
Your Data, Your Solution
Your data is a literal goldmine that Yieldigo will help you mechanize into truly reliable pricing strategy insights against your competition. To leverage the power offered by the many features and tools that are part of a price management product, you will also need to apply your own historical data, your data lake’s treasure trove of information, and all reliable data source structures your business has stored over the years.
Combined with competitor data from a reliable data scraping tool, your price management software is fully armed to give you a 360 degree pricing view that you will finally fully be in control of within your Yieldigo solution. And, we say your solution literally, because once you apply your data and methodologies to Yieldigo, it is in fact your environment that you are in control of.
In this article, we will evaluate what a data scraping tool is, the role data scraping plays within a good pricing strategy, and how this puzzle piece can be a great contribution of input data into Yieldigo.
The Importance of Data Scraping in Retail
In today’s data-driven world, the retail industry faces the challenge of navigating through vast amounts of information to make informed business decisions, especially pricing. Amidst this challenge, data scraping tools emerge as powerful allies, revolutionizing the way retail businesses gather, analyze, and utilize data. These tools are designed to extract valuable data from various online sources swiftly and efficiently, providing businesses with important insights that can drive growth and potentially help a business stay ahead of the competition.
It is important to note that it is critical to clean this data, as well as all of your business’s data, in order to make the most of its potential. Raw data from a scraping tool in itself is rarely actionable, as there will be some degree of error even with the best data scraping services and tools. We will learn about the pitfalls and issues with data scraped research a bit later in the article.
What Does a Data Scraping Tool Do?
At its core, a data scraping tool functions as a digital mechanism capable of systematically collecting data from websites, APIs, databases, and other online repositories. Through automated processes, these tools traverse through web pages, extract relevant information based on predefined parameters, and the best data scraping tools can organize it all into structured formats for further analysis (the key here is “further analysis”, as we will see later). This process enables retail businesses to gather data on products, prices, customer reviews, competitor strategies, market trends, and more, without the need for manual intervention.
The greatest benefit of data scraping tools is how they provide loads of potentially business-critical insights without much effort needed. However, it should be pointed out that oftentimes someone may need to know programming or, must pay a developer in order to render optimal results. Nonetheless, a great opportunity readily presents itself to pricing teams with a data scraping tool’s capabilities, if they are able to harness its potential.
Is a Data Scraping Tool Alone Sufficient?
Data scraping tools can offer simple rules-based recommendations in terms of what retailers should do with their pricing, in order to stay afloat amongst their competition. As such, these tools are able to offer access to vast amounts of valuable data that is critical for informed decision-making. From competitive intelligence and market research in bulk, to partial inventory management and customer experience enhancement, these tools allow retailers to gain a competitive edge, drive growth, and inform themselves accordingly in an increasingly dynamic and data-driven business landscape.
Embracing data scraping tools is not just a strategic choice for retailers—for most, it’s a necessity to stay relevant and successful in the digital age. So, if you have a good data scraping provider or in-house tool that works for your organization, keep it!
But, is it enough to create a full-proof pricing strategy that is consistently reliable?
Why a Data Scraping Tool Alone Is Not Sufficient
Data scraping tools help businesses by giving them the ability to react to the market by knowing competitor prices. The problem: These businesses are still not coming up with a decisive, accurate, and well-rounded strategy of their own that keeps them in control of their prices and their business. In other words, they are pricing only in reaction to the competition, but they are not in control of the retail game, and typically, they are not even in control of their own pricing game.
It is primarily for this reason that if retailers intend to truly be in charge of their pricing, they cannot rely on data scraping alone. If not input correctly into a price management solution, a retail organization is left with nothing but iffy conjectures and halfway reliable insights that in the end are not sufficient to deliver a truly reliable pricing strategy.
Furthermore, a data scraping tool does not provide any control over the data that is rendered. The best data scraping tools can provide some form of simple pricing logic to build on the data it captures. But, the fact of the matter is that the majority of data scraping tools do data capture with no further analysis. A data scraping tool’s goal is to scour the web and provide bulk amounts of data that can be very insightful, but not to perform in depth analyses of said data.
As such, data scraping tools lack some extremely important features and capabilities. But, technological and strategic limitations are not the only reasons why you cannot rely solely on a data scraping tool.
Data Scraping is Prone to Errors and Misinformation
Raw data that has been acquired by using a data scraping tool has the following pitfalls that we must be aware of:
- Unreliable Data – Data scraped from competitor websites can be unreliable or incomplete, even outdated. This leads to collection of bogus data that serves no purpose other than to skew prices, damage price perception, and ruin business.
- Product Grouping Errors – Often mismatching price per single product, multipack, price per kg, and similar popular product groupings. These errors can offer incorrect prices for grouped products, and ruin the bulk pricing advantage that retailers are supposed to offer to their customers.
- Incorrect Product Matching by Name – Keep in mind that even products that are technically the same have different names in different locations (e.g. Coca-Cola Light in parts of Europe and Asia vs. Diet Coke in the U.S.). It is especially complicated for a data scraping tool to match products that are not exactly the same by name, including different size/packaging, private brand products and white labels, etc., leading to very unfortunate and visible pricing errors.
It is precisely due to the above-mentioned lack of technological prowess, as well as the likelihood of receiving unclean data, that retail businesses cannot rely solely on a data scraping tool.
Applying Data Scraping Inputs into Yieldigo Price Management Software
We are not going to dive into what different features Yieldigo’s price management software offers in this article. If you would like to know more about the different tools and technologies price management software can offer, you can read about the most important ones in the following article. And, if you would like to know more about Yieldigo’s product, feel free visit our product page.
Instead, let’s briefly demonstrate how Yieldigo can use your data scraping results and research to create a brilliant pricing strategy.
How Yieldigo Uses Data Scraping Inputs for Price Management
The scrollable graphic below shows how Yieldigo is able to make use of the findings extracted by a data scraping tool. As you can see, our Delivery Team helps your team implement your Yieldigo software into your environment. As such, we also help you put all of that great research from your data scraping tool into action!
