Choosing a price research tool
By hand, a general scraper, a research firm, or a dedicated monitoring service — what actually separates the four options for tracking competitor prices.
Short answer. If you are watching 30 items or fewer, once a month, do it by hand. If you need it daily, need to show where each figure came from, or need to compare across currencies, a dedicated tool costs less overall.
Below are the differences that actually decide it.
Four options
1. By hand, into a spreadsheet
No setup cost. Up to 30 items, monthly, this is the fastest route.
What breaks is not the count but the frequency. Thirty items daily is nine hundred copies a month, and past that point your main sources of error are missed rows and mistyped figures.
2. A general-purpose scraper
Fetching is cheap. The distance is between fetching and having a figure you can trust.
- The same product under two spellings is counted as two products
- Thousands separators and currency symbols drop prices silently
- A page that failed to load looks the same as a listing that was removed
All three look like success at runtime, and the totals look plausible.
3. A research firm
People look at the pages, so judgement-heavy questions are handled well. Good for a one-off decision.
Poor for continuous work: you cannot buy that accuracy every day, and each refresh is a new invoice.
4. A dedicated price monitoring service (this is where Kansoku sits)
Suited to daily, continuous work where provenance has to be recorded. Overkill for a one-off study.
How to choose
- How often? Monthly is option 1. Daily is option 4
- How many? Thirty is fine by hand. Hundreds means 2 or 4
- Will a person see the figures? Then you need provenance — option 4
- Do you need judgement? "Is this price sensible?" is option 3
When Kansoku is the wrong choice
Plainly. If any of these apply, choose something else.
- A one-off study — there is no point paying for a standing mechanism
- Prices behind a login — we do not fetch them; authentication is not bypassed
- Sites that decline in robots.txt — we honour it, so they are not covered
- Minute-by-minute tracking — sweeps run once a day
What Kansoku does do
- Reads public listing pages at a fixed time each day
- Records when a listing disappears — the closest public signal to a sale
- Normalises to a tax-exclusive basis before comparing across countries
- Records the exchange rate together with its publication date
- Records a source that could not be read as unread — never as empty
- Exports by CSV and API
See Solutions and How it works.
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