Price monitoring is a common use case for web scraping. By extracting pricing information from websites, you can track changes over time and adjust your own pricing strategies accordingly.
Many users have asked how to use Octoparse for price monitoring. Check out the steps below to get started.
1. Build a task to scrape pricing
You can scrape the search results page to get prices for similar products or scrape a list of product pages.
Here are some related tutorials:
2. Schedule the task to run based on your needs
Usually, price monitoring is a long-term job. You must scrape the prices at a certain frequency to get more information.
Octoparse supports scheduling tasks to run in the Cloud. You don't have to keep watching it or set alarms to remind yourself. (Check out more details at Schedule tasks to run.)
TIP: To make sure you can easily know on which date the data rows are scraped, you can add "current date & time" as a field.
3. Export the data automatically from Octoparse to your database
Octoparse is only a web scraping tool. To do more pricing calculations and data analysis, you will need to use another data analysis tool. So you have to export the data to your database.
Octoparse supports exporting data to MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Google Sheets, and Oracle automatically. If you want to export to other databases or platforms, you may need to use our API if you have a coding background.