Chapter 7. PRICE-MONITORING WEBBOTS
In this chapter, we'll look at a strategic application of webbotsâmonitoring online prices. There are many reasons one would do this. For example, a webbot might monitor prices for these purposes:
Notifying someone (via email or text message[24]) when a price drops below a preset threshold
Predicting price trends by performing statistical analysis on price histories
Establishing your company's prices by studying what the competition charges for similar items
Regardless of your reasons to monitor prices, the one thing that all of these strategies have in common is that they all download web pages containing prices and then identify and parse the data.
In this chapter, I will describe methods for monitoring online ...
Get Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
