Why Pricing Gets Scraped
Your pricing is valuable competitive intelligence:
- Competitors want to undercut - Match or beat your prices
- Arbitrage operations - Find price differences to exploit
- Market intelligence firms - Sell pricing data
- Resellers - Monitor for deals to flip
Automated scraping gives them real-time data on your pricing.
Impact of Price Scraping
Lost Competitive Advantage
- Competitors always know your prices
- Can’t maintain pricing edge
- Race to the bottom accelerates
Market Position Erosion
- Unique pricing strategies exposed
- Sale timing becomes predictable
- Promotional patterns revealed
Margin Pressure
- Always being undercut
- Forced to match lower prices
- Profit margins shrink
How Scraping Works
Automated Bots
- Visit your product pages
- Extract price data
- Run continuously
- Update competitor databases
Third-Party Services
- Prisync, Competera, etc.
- Scrape thousands of stores
- Sell data to subscribers
- Your competitors may subscribe
Manual Monitoring
- Dedicated staff checking prices
- Screenshot comparisons
- Less frequent but harder to stop
Protection Strategies
Block Bot Infrastructure
Most scrapers run from:
- Data centers (AWS, Google Cloud)
- Hosting providers
- VPN/proxy services
SecurEcommerce blocking stops these at the source.
Content Protection
Make scraping harder:
- Disable dev tools
- Block automated access
- Prevent easy extraction
Geographic Blocking
If scrapers come from specific regions:
- Block non-customer countries
- Restrict to shipping regions
- Reduce attack surface
Implementation
Enable Anti-Scraping Protection
- Open SecurEcommerce
- Go to Blocking > ISP Blocking
- Block major data center providers
- Enable VPN/Proxy blocking
- Save settings
Content Protection
- Navigate to Content Protection
- Enable all anti-scraping options
- This adds friction to extraction
Monitor for Scraping
Watch your analytics for:
- Unusual traffic patterns
- High page views, no conversions
- Repetitive access patterns
- Data center traffic
Balancing Protection and Access
Don’t Block
- Search engine crawlers (SEO)
- Legitimate customers
- Your shipping regions
Safe to Block
- Data center traffic
- VPN/Proxy users (usually)
- Non-shipping countries
- Known scraping services
What You Can’t Prevent
Some monitoring is unavoidable:
- Manual price checking by humans
- Customers sharing prices
- Public information
Focus on preventing automated, large-scale scraping.
Signs of Price Scraping
Watch for these indicators:
- Traffic spikes without sales
- Repetitive patterns in logs
- Competitors matching price changes quickly
- Data center IPs in analytics
Response to Scraping
If you detect scraping:
- Block identified sources
- Tighten geographic restrictions
- Enable additional protections
- Monitor for new patterns
- Consider changing pricing schedule