How to Use AI for Automated Price Scraping?
Market intelligence is nice, vital even, but someone has to gather it first. And for such a basic item as pricing, automated price scraping is one of the most efficient ways to collect it. Recently, a new helper arose in the field: AI in the form of large language models. But how exactly do you use AI for automated price scraping?
What is Price Scraping?
Price scraping is a subset of web scraping focused on collecting pricing data. On a primitive level, the data could just be a line containing the title of the item and its price. However, we live in an era that’s a bit more advanced, able to gather a lot more data – and faster.
Instead of going to a webstore and manually recording prices, you can have a bot do the scraping.
None of the tedious, error-prone data entry for you. And if a bot can scrape a store once, it can do so again multiple times a day if you feel like it. What’s more, it can do so for multiple competitors, allowing you to keep tabs on everyone.
AI-assisted price scraping is merely meant to decrease the upkeep necessary to keep continuous scraping going. A traditional bot would be thrown for a loop with any changes to the target website. But if an AI sits at the tip of the spear, it can use its powers of human-like perception to detect prices no matter how much the underlying code changes. Or it can write you a new bot.
Why Use Price Scraping
There is no single profile of someone who benefits from web scraping. In fact, there are multiple use cases for automated price scraping.
Ecommerce competition tracking: if you know what your competition is doing, you can adjust your own pricing accordingly. You may try to beat their price or notice that you’re underpricing compared to the average. Whichever way you go, automated price scraping gives you the power to be agile.
Deal grabbing: now, if you’re a customer rather than a store, you’re more than likely interested in finding the best price. However, coupon clipping is so last year (and involves scary scissors). Browser coupon add-ons can be up to shady business. But with automated price scraping, you can get your own alerts for the hottest deals.
Dropshippers and resellers: you straddle the line between regular stores and consumers. Your profit margin depends very much on buying it low and selling it high. So whether you’re getting bulk goods off Alibaba or Amazon, you’d best be on your toes, automated-style.
Market research: damn, it would be crazy if you could get a machine to gather and crunch all the data you can then base your insights on. And you can! With automated price scraping, you can quickly build a price-history database. Analyzing them will reveal seasonality, pricing dynamics, and market reactions to events.
Price comparison websites: you’re the most middle of the middle men, and your goal is to be the best of your kind. If any business lives or dies on large-scale automated price scraping, it’s yours.
How Does It Actually Work?
Automated price scraping works like other forms of web scraping. The most likely approach is this:
- Map the product pages (via web crawling)
- Download the HTML of the product pages
- Find whichever code lines contain the product title and price
- Clean, validate and slam all that data into a sheet or database somewhere.
Granted, it’s not that easy. Ecommerce stores do not appreciate all that scraping traffic. After all, it’s not converting into actual purchases. That’s why they have safeguards to block automated traffic. This means you have to get crafty, using proxy servers to bypass rate limiting and session management, JavaScript rendering to tackle page design, and implementing other workarounds to mimic paying customers.
…and then the target website changes the design, and you have to rewrite your bot all over again, nooo!
Or rather, that would be the case were it not for the sneaky invention of LLMs/AI-powered tools. They can be used in two ways:
- Asking the AI to write you a new scraper: much faster than doing it on your own, but still reliant on monitoring the script for any change-related breakdown. Still, your only token expenditure is in writing the script.
- Asking the AI to scrape the page itself: no code, no script, just natural language prompts and vibes. Since AI can parse a website visually (just like you, human), it is unlikely to be misled by changes in HTML. You can do that with ChatGPT if you like, but it is token-intensive no matter the model.
But that’s just a high-level overview – the process is a bit more involved.
Legal & Ethical Considerations for AI-Assisted Price Scraping
What other things should you consider before you go AI scrape-happy? Well, laws and ethical considerations still apply. You probably don’t want to cross those lines.
- Check your local laws: whether relying on hiQlabs vs LinkedIn in the US or text and data mining exceptions in the European space, check to see if what you do conforms to the law. Since price data isn’t creative, copyrighted work, you should be OK, but don’t quote us on it: this is not legal advice. Naturally, using price scraping to just clone a website is an outright no-no.
- Only scrape publicly available data: this means price data that isn’t hidden behind logins, paywalls or other access controls.
- Limit your request rate: don’t be an arse that overloads the target website by scraping it every fifteen seconds.
- Respect robots.txt: self-explanatory, really.
If you want to know more, we just so happen to have an article on web scraping best practices.
How to Set Up Your AI Scraper
There are two ways to set up an automated AI price scraper: asking a publicly accessible AI to write code for you or using a ready-made commercial solution.
Using an LLM
This is the most primitive way to go about things: using, say, ChatGPT, to write a scraping script for you.
Here’s how this process looks in the abstract:
- Prepare the ground:
- Get a ChatGPT account for obvious reasons.
- Get a text editor – your device probably already has one, like Notepad on Windows. This is the place to drop the code before using it
- Choose a programming language – Python, JavaScript with Node.js, etc. all work.
- Get any necessary libraries – these are the tools your other tools will use, like BeautifulSoup, which is a collection of parsers capable of tackling various page formats.
- Identify the selectors you need: this involves going over the target’s page with Inspect Element (or whatever your non-Chrome browser calls it). That way, you can find the price and title tags that your scraper will target.
- Get ChatGPT to write you a scraper: your prompt needs to include what you want the LLM to do, what URL to target, what language and libraries to use, and what format the output should be.
- Test and run the code: AI-generated code may contain errors, so a review is needed. Run your code and see if you have to modify the prompt.
For a more in-depth explanation of how this process goes, read our step-by-step guide for web scraping with ChatGPT.
Using a Commercial Product
Any web scraping service provider worth his salt is now providing AI scraping services, from writing code to carrying out the scraping. Here’s how the process would go, using Oxylabs AI Studio as an example – Oxylabs is a big player in the scene and AI Studio has a no-strings-attached trial. Here’s how you take it for a spin:
- Get an Oxylabs AI Studio account.
- Log in.
- Of the AI tools on offer, pick Scrape.
- Enter the target URL.
- Choose geolocation if you need to.
- Pick whether to use JavaScript rendering (auto should work).
- Pick your output format – since we want just prices and titles, pick JSON, CSV or TOON.
- Generate a schema based on your requirements (titles and prices)
- Run the scrape tool.
- Inspect the results on the site.
And that’s just the basic version of it. For a full scraping experience, you’d need a full AI studio account for both scale and integration into your processes. Once the scrapes are scheduled, and the data is routed to databases, it will become the core of your automated scraping system.
Frequently Asked Questions About Using AI for Automated Price Scraping
AI price scraping is legal as long as you’re scraping open information that is not hidden behind logins. As always, check your local regulations – we do not give legal advice.
AI can write scraping scripts for you or scrape competitor prices by itself, so yes.
It is possible for AI scraping to capture dynamic prices if you set the scraping interval to be short enough. However, that will require a lot of resources and eat up more of the target website’s bandwidth.
If you’re using AI to write a price scraping script that you have determined was accurate, it will remain accurate until site architecture changes.
