More and more of our data ends up online each day. Various platforms sell it to companies, which analyze it to improve their products and services, which they then market back to us. They gather data using different techniques, but with immense competition, even that data isn’t enough.

Instead, companies are turning toward each other. They analyze each other’s data and prices for products or services to stay competitive in an ever-competing world. The process of collecting pricing data from various markets and the competition is called price intelligence. However, there are many difficulties when it comes to price intelligence.

That’s where a proxy server comes in. Proxy servers are helpful for price intelligence and comparison, making the process easier and quicker. This article discusses how proxy servers are beneficial for price intelligence and what advantages they carry.

What are price intelligence and comparison?

Price intelligence is collecting, analyzing, and interpreting prices from marketplaces and the competition. It involves identifying current trends, monitoring and analyzing various marketplaces, and keeping an eye on competitors’ prices to understand how it impacts the pricing of a product or service.

You can use it to create a new or better existing pricing strategy, identify new opportunities for different markets or products, and track the effectiveness of current prices and decisions. Governments can also use it to monitor and identify any potential pricing errors or financial frauds.

On the other hand, the comparison part primarily deals with comparing prices with the competition. Naturally, if you and another company offer a similar product but at two different prices, consumers will most often pick the cheaper option. To stay competitive when it comes to pricing, companies use price comparisons.

Main difficulties when it comes to price intelligence

Price intelligence and comparison can be challenging even for larger companies. The more competition for a product or service, the trickier price monitoring is. These are just some of the difficulties that exist when it comes to price intelligence.

Data collection

If the data is spread across multiple sources, it can be quite challenging to collect it accurately. Moreover, some companies don’t publicly display their prices, which makes data collection even more complicated.

Price changes

Pricing on specific products and services changes frequently. It can be tough to track these changes, especially if you need to monitor them on multiple platforms or markets.

Cost

As you usually don’t do price intelligence and comparison manually anymore, it involves implementing an automated price intelligence system. The cost of such a system can be high, as it often includes investing in new hardware, software, and staff.

Legality

Companies must ensure they’re not breaking any laws by collecting pricing data. They must consider various legal and ethical concerns. For example, there is price fixing, which is highly unethical.

How proxies can help

Although proxies don’t guarantee your anonymity, they certainly increase it. Moreover, they make price intelligence and comparison a lot easier. That’s why companies and even individuals often use proxy servers, such as static residential proxies.

Static residential proxies work like all other types of proxy servers. They hide the user’s IP address, giving them a fake one, and act as an intermediary between the user and the server. Still, what makes these residential proxies so valuable?

Static residential proxies combine the best of two worlds. They give you the speed of datacenter proxies and the organicness of real users, giving you many advantages when it comes to price intelligence and comparison, including:

  • Anonymity – They mask your IP address, making these residential proxies perfect for all types of web scraping, data mining, price intelligence, and price comparison.
  • Location-based data collection – You can access websites as a user from a different location, which can be pretty helpful for collecting pricing data, making it representative of global market conditions.
  • Geo-restriction bypass – Websites often have geo-restrictions, so proxy servers can help bypass them and access content as users from different regions.
  • Lower chances of bans – These proxies allow IP address rotation, meaning you can avoid using a single IP. You get a new IP address for every HTTP request, which lowers the chance of getting an IP block.
  • Parallelism – You can send multiple HTTP requests to a server simultaneously, making data collection a lot faster and reducing the time necessary to extract data.

Conclusion

Price intelligence and comparison are valuable methods companies use to stay competitive. However, factors such as price changes, multiple competitors, costs, and difficult data collection make price comparisons challenging.

A proxy server, such as a static residential proxy, is the best tool to facilitate price intelligence and comparison, especially when you get it from a top-tier company such as Oxylabs. These proxy servers speed up the job and give you advantages such as parallelism, anonymity, and geo-restricted bypass while lowering the chance of getting an IP block or ban.