How to monitor prices from location-sensitive stores?
As eCommerce evolves, many websites have enabled showing different prices (and product information in general) depending on the client’s location. Understandably, this makes price monitoring more complex and difficult. In such cases, a price monitoring tool can not crawl only one price because the website will show different prices depending on the geographical location.
There are a few potential situations:
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Websites that show different availability/price/shipping costs based on the client’s address (which is often derived from his IP address).
For example, websites that rely heavily on this technique are Amazon and Walmart. -
Websites that explicitly ask you to choose your local store – and then display prices/availability from that store.
We have encountered such websites in geographically dispersed countries – most of them Russia, but also UAE, Australia, and the US. -
Many websites are offering more languages.
These are all great news for customers, but for price monitoring tools they are a nightmare! So many variations that can affect the product’s price!
At Price2Spy we developed solutions for these scenarios. All that clients have to do is let us know what locations we should use. For example, they can give 3 separate locations for Walmart – and we’ll treat them as 3 separate URLs in our reports – Walmart A, Walmart B, and Walmart C. When it comes to picking different languages and currencies, we follow a simple rule - if a person can do it, Price2Spy can do it, too.
You can read more on our blog
Can you think of any other scenarios where geographical locations and location-sensitive stores can make it harder for price monitoring?
There are different sites that help to personalize your site. This includes determining the socio economic situation of the area where the consumer is living. The site is called Twik I recommend you checking it out!