Q: monitor competitors

Do you think is possible with nocode-x to create a system that monitor competitors product pages (price, product name, product description etc..) periodically to check new products and save the old products ? how many credits would use to buuild it and how many to launch the periodic scrapers?

matteo77PLUSMar 24, 2025
Founder Team
Wim_NoCode-X

Wim_NoCode-X

Mar 25, 2025

A: YES, YOU CAN BUILD A COMPETITOR MONITORING SYSTEM WITH NOCODE-X!

Hello matteo77,

Creating a system to monitor competitors' product pages is absolutely possible with NoCode-X. The platform provides the flexibility and tools you need to build such a solution, whether it’s scraping product data or integrating with APIs. Let me guide you through the key considerations and steps.

HOW TO MONITOR COMPETITORS

First, check if the competitor’s website offers an API. If it does, always use the API—it’s more robust and less prone to changes compared to web scraping. However, if no API is available, you can use NoCode-X to build a web scraper. Keep in mind that scraping is sensitive to website changes, so you’ll need to maintain it periodically.

In NoCode-X, you can define data structures to store information like product name, price, and description. You can also enrich this data with additional fields like vendor, date, and time to enable trend analysis. This will allow you to track price evolution, detect new products, and identify obsolete ones.

To ensure your scraper runs efficiently, you can create a scheduled task (JOB) in NoCode-X. This allows you to define the frequency of data collection, either by selecting a predefined schedule or using a custom crontab regex.

CREDITS USAGE

The credits required to build the scraper depend on your familiarity with NoCode-X. If you’re new, I recommend starting with our educational YouTube videos to understand the components and processes you’ll need. Once you’re comfortable, the AI assistant (coming very soon!) can help streamline the development process.

For running the periodic scrapers, the credit usage will depend on the frequency, volume, numebr of competitors and complexity of the scraping tasks. If you’re scraping large amounts of data frequently, you may need to monitor your resource consumption and amp-up. But in general the tiering 2 or 3 are enterprise apps, so give it a try.

ADDITIONAL TIPS

If you’re concerned about IP throttling or being blocked by the target website, you can use a proxy service like ScrapingBee. NoCode-X supports plugins for such services, allowing you to implement smart proxies easily. This reduces the risk of being flagged while scraping.

GETTING STARTED

Before diving in, I highly recommend checking out our YouTube channel for tutorials and insights: https://www.youtube.com/@nocode-x

If you have more questions or need assistance, feel free to join our vibrant Discord community for direct interactions with the product team: https://discord.gg/36Ju8sjYvy

We’re here to help you build a powerful competitor monitoring system and make the most of NoCode-X. Let us know how we can support you further! 😊

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Posted: Mar 25, 2025

For now i need a monthly check of about 40 competitors for a total of 4000 products and about 10% of new products monthly. Is there a way to scrape only new products and not the whole products at each cycle?

Founder
Posted: Mar 27, 2025

Well matteo77

depends on the approach:

- API normally you will be able to request updates since
- Scraping is pulling all in, and then in your data processing manage the new products and the product which are e.g. still active in your database, if not found in the scan put these as inactive

this will both allow you to keep track over time and do some analysis on the offering and e.g., price-evo