IT Glossary
What is web scraping?
The robot reader: programs that visit websites and automatically extract structured data — prices, stock, listings — at scale and on schedule.
Technically, any information published on the web can be read by a program the same way a person reads it — just at industrial scale: web scraping is the automated extraction of data from websites — a robot visits pages, “reads” the content and turns it into structured data (tables, feeds, alerts), on schedule, daily or hourly. The business uses that make it interesting for ordinary companies: monitoring competitors’ prices (retail’s classic — the rival catalog read daily with alerts on changes; ready-made services exist for this), aggregating market information (listings, public tenders, supplier stock where no API exists), watching your own presence (your prices at resellers, reviews, mentions) and feeding data wherever an API is missing — because the architectural rule stands: where an official API exists, the API always wins (stable, legally clear, efficient); scraping is the solution for the rest of the web. The legal reality is nuanced — neither “forbidden” nor “free-for-all”: public data isn’t protected by mere publication, so scraping in itself is not illegal, but the boundaries matter: website terms of use (breaching them is contractual risk — especially with large platforms, which actively defend themselves), copyright over content (extracting facts like prices and specifications differs from republishing creative content), GDPR when the data is personal (mass-harvesting profiles and contacts “because they were public” is not covered by that word — scraping personal leads is where most of the field’s fines live) and good technical manners (a reasonable pace that doesn’t strain the target site, respecting robots.txt as hygiene). The technical reality, for honest budgets: scraping is fragile by nature — sites change their structure and the robot goes “blind” without notice, so a serious implementation includes failure alerts and planned maintenance, exactly as with RPA; and sites that defend themselves (CAPTCHA, blocking) raise costs until the healthy question appears: is this data truly worth the effort, or is there a direct route — a partnership, a data service, a paid API? The mirror view, as a bonus: your site gets scraped too — by competitors, aggregators and AI robots; whatever you publish is effectively public for machines, a reality to factor into your content and pricing strategy.
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Why it matters for your business
The market, monitored continuously
Competitor prices, relevant listings and supplier stock — read automatically, daily, with alerts on changes; eyes on the market without hours of browsing.
Data where no API exists
Public information without an official interface still becomes a structured feed — the pragmatic bridge to sources that never modernized.
Pricing decisions on fresh information
Competitor repositionings are visible the day they happen, not in a quarterly report — your pricing can respond to reality, not to memories.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to monitor competitors’ prices automatically?
Monitoring public prices — practiced at scale across the retail market — sits in the widely accepted zone: prices are public facts, not protected by copyright. Risks appear at the edges: flagrant breaches of large platforms’ terms (they defend themselves, including in court), abusive technical load on target sites and — categorically — personal data (people, not prices). Prudent commercial practice: civilized pace, reasonable volumes, no fake accounts, and targeted legal advice if stakes or scale grow.
We want leads — can we automatically collect contacts from websites and LinkedIn?
Here the answer changes: names, emails and profiles are personal data, and GDPR applies regardless of their being “public” — mass collection for marketing needs a legal basis that contact scraping rarely has, platforms expressly forbid it in their terms, and European fines for exactly this model exist. Legitimate alternatives: company data from official sources (public registers, companies’ own sites — generic office@ addresses in a B2B context sit under a different regime than individuals), B2B data services that contractually assume compliance, and — old-fashioned but legal — marketing that attracts instead of harvesting.
What does a custom scraping solution cost, and how long does it last?
Construction: from a few hundred euros for one or two simply structured sites to thousands for multi-source monitoring with serious anti-bot measures — plus, mandatory in the calculation, maintenance: robots go blind at every redesign of the targeted sites, so budget monthly upkeep with failure alerts (a “build it and forget it” solution dies silently within 3–6 months while you make decisions on frozen data without knowing). Evaluate first the alternative: existing SaaS monitoring services — especially for retail prices — whose subscription often beats the total cost of owning your own.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247