REAL-TIME DYNAMIC PRICING SYSTEM

摘要

A real-time dynamic pricing system and method is provided, which includes a user interface, scraping and analytics components, and a batch processing server. Using the pricing system, a seller defines a product that is sold via the seller's webstore and another webstore that competes with it. The pricing system then configures a scraper based on the competing webstore's site layout. The scraper, executing in the cloud, determines whether the product is offered for sale through the competing webstore by scraping data from one of its webpages. If the scraper finds an exact product match, the scraper stores the data attributes in a data store accessible to the dynamic pricing system, and creates a price data point from the data attributes. Once the pricing system has compiled sufficient pricing data, the pricing system estimates an optimal price for the product by applying a user-specified pricing rule to the pricing data.

主权项

1. A method of automating price changes for a webstore, comprising the steps:
(a) defining a product that is sold via a first webstore; (b) identifying a second webstore that competes with the first webstore; (c) configuring a scraper based on a layout of the second webstore; (d) determining whether the product is offered for sale through the second webstore by instructing the scraper to scrape data from a webpage of the second webstore; (e) if the scraper finds an exact product match on the webpage, storing attributes of the exact product match in a data store; (f) creating a price data point from the stored attributes; (g) compiling pricing data for the product by repeating steps (d) through (f) over a time period; and (h) estimating an optimal price for the product by applying a user-specified pricing rule to the pricing data.