Price Comparison Portals / Mobile Apps

A number of Visual Web Ripper users operate retail or industry specific pricing portals and/or mobile apps. They scrape hundreds of websites around the world to deliver up-to-date cheapest pricing data on a large range of products / services for bargain hunting consumers.

Data Aggregation

Automated data aggregation can:

• Improve accuracy by de-duplicating collected data and eliminating manual intervention
• Reduce costs by automating previously manual data monitoring and collection tasks
• Broaden coverage by collecting accurate data from thousands of websites worldwide.

Data aggregation examples include:

Collaborative lists (e.g. home foreclosures, job boards, tourist attractions)

Visual Web Ripper can be used to periodically grab content updates from thousands of different websites around the world. A central information source, (be it website or periodic data reports) can provide competitive advantage for companies and individual users alike.

News & Content Aggregation

News & Content Aggregation can help you manage information overload while ensuring you are up-to-date. Visual Web Ripper can help you:

• Extract news through automation
• Filter available articles into convenient categories
• Search content based on categories
• Personalize search to customise displayed data categories
• Find similar stories through contextual analysis.

Search Engine rankings

Find the keywords your competitors rank highly with on the major search engines. You can use Visual Web Ripper to retrieve search results, both organic and Pay-Per Click (PPC) from the major search engines. You can also retrieve this detail for different geographies.

Market Intelligence and Monitoring

Competitive pricing

Do you know the most up-to-date offers of your competitors, the price at which distributors sell your products or what are the best selling products in the market?

Information freely available on the web can be turned into a competitive advantage by monitoring and extracting critical pricing intelligence and inventory information of millions of products from multiple competing websites. You can easily retrieve competitive data like:

• Competitors' categories & products
• Product titles & descriptions
• Product SKUs, model number, make year, etc
• Product images & call-to-actions
• Average sale & retail price of products.

You can also:

• collect real-time data to support dynamic pricing and increase market share
• uphold the pricing power of your brand by monitoring for flash sales and unauthorized discounting.

Visual Web Ripper can give you direct access to information that will enable you to develop winning pricing strategies, drive higher customer acquisition and grow market share.

Retail Chain monitoring

Do you have no control over, or limited visibility of how retailers are selling your products?

We help suppliers monitor their minimum advertised pricing policies. This helps them to effectively control their product pricing and maintain margins – protecting the value of their brands.

Retail chain monitoring helps you to:

• Track inventory on retailers’ websites
• Obtain details on SKU level activity
• Prevent minimum advertised price violations
• Monitor dealers for price compliance
• Monitor change in market dynamics.

Social Media and Brand monitoring

More and more customers are shopping online and publicly sharing their opinions and buying preferences. Visual Web Ripper gives you the ability to easily source a rich stream of customer sentiment:

• Track social interactions and gossip around your products
• Monitor product reviews on YouTube, Epinions, Yelp, etc
• Gauge customer reactions to a new product
• Address product satisfaction issues before they get out of hand
• Track customer sentiment for specific stock shares and options
• Determine if there a usability problem with your service
• Collect customer sentiment over time for trend analysis.

IP protection

Visual Web Ripper can help you monitor various online sources for copyright infringement – where a company's products have been illegally copied and shared online.

This enables companies (i.e. media and entertainment), to detect and remove infringing content more rapidly and to reduce revenue losses.

Compliance & Risk Management

The management of compliance and risk is a difficult challenge for many organizations, particularly those in financial services. Financial penalties for non-compliance with anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing regulations can be significant – into the millions of dollars.

The majority of watch lists and sanctions lists as well as regulations for federal, state and international are available on the Web and are continually being updated. Companies can use automated web data monitoring and extraction to:

• Maintain compliance with AML and terrorist financing laws
• Confirm the integrity of potential business partners
• Decrease exposure to fraudulent activity
• Save time and money in tracking changes to these sites.

Government Solutions

Automated Web data monitoring and extraction solutions are enabling government agencies to more easily satisfy significant policy and regulatory mandates. Increasingly, agencies are tapping into public-source Web data for a variety of applications including:

• Obtaining timely updates on news and activities around the world
• Monitoring opinions and sentiment from social media websites and blogs
• Reducing data collection and IT costs – through reductions in manual labour
• Industry research
• Open-source intelligence (OSINT)
• Information sharing between government sites.

Visual Web Ripper is helping government agencies around the world to reduce costs, access normally hard to get information, and support timely decision-making.

Background Checking

Numerous organizations require qualifications or licences for different professions. Many, particularly financial services organizations and government agencies, require criminal checks to be carried out.

Most court records are online these days as are the sex offender registry (SOR) and national sex offender registry (NSOR) libraries. Many professional associations post information on the Web.

Visual Web Ripper allows you to aggregate data from multiple sources to perform comparisons and verify credentials. Automatic web-based retrieval reduces cost and improves accuracy while dramatically improving turnaround times for obtaining results.

Sales Lead Generation

The web is a great source of valuable sales leads for your business, but manually retrieving the required data can take a long time. With Visual Web Ripper, you can remove the time and effort sales teams typically spend manually searching for, copying and compiling this information, allowing them to focus on core revenue-generating activities.

Users can quickly locate and capture email and physical addresses, phone numbers and other vital information about target demographics from relevant online directories, member listing pages, industry associations and other sites. There’s no manual cutting and pasting and you get the leads you need in a fraction of the time.

Visual Web Ripper can also easily update contact details on an ongoing basis to maintain the integrity of your lead database.

Content Integration

Content migration (i.e. CMS / CRM)

Migrating to a new content management system (CMS) or client relationship management system (CRM) can be a major integration nightmare. Legacy content and proprietary systems often lead to long and costly migration projects.

With Visual Web Ripper you can kiss the nightmare goodbye. It lets you quickly automate many aspects of the migration process for browser-based implementations and take control over your project rather than relying on a “black box” vendor solutions. Typical implementations are completed in a fraction of the time with minimal content freeze windows and significant cost savings. The end result is robust and flexible solution that can be easily maintained.

Enterprise Search

Visual Web Ripper enables you to enrich legacy and unstructured content without relying on manual processes. A large portion of the information generated today is unstructured and user generated – living in blogs, user forums, wiki discussions, customer support forums, product review sites, etc. Visual Web Ripper can be easily employed to automatically associate rich metadata with this information and significantly improve the quality of search results.

Application Integration / Workflow automation

Many organizations need to synchronize content between different applications for business operations or workflow improvements. This can be difficult with legacy applications which often do not include APIs to facilitate integration.

With Visual Web Ripper you can easily synchronize content between multiple browser-based systems. Visual Web Ripper’s automated agents are used to grab content from one system and automatically transfer it to one or multiple systems. The removal of the manual processes of logging on to websites and cutting-and-pasting leads can bring significant productivity improvements.

This also provides companies with a new level of platform independence. No longer will companies need to rely on specific software manufactures or IT consulting groups to build costly interfaces to these legacy systems.

B2B Integration / Process Automation

Partner / Supplier / Customer integration

Expanding on organizational workflow, as covered above, companies can significantly benefit by being more closely integrated with their business partners, suppliers and their key customers.

In order for companies to optimize their partner supply chain or to maintain good linkages with their key customers, they need a flexible integration solution that can cope with changes in partner technology. To more accurately predict demand and fulfill services, companies need to be able integrate with other organizations’ systems quickly and seamlessly.

Visual Web Ripper’s automated content synchronization can deliver this competitive advantage in the dynamic B2B environment, which often lacks APIs or where the scale of partner integrations are often cost prohibitive.

For example, sales information from multiple external partner systems can be extracted, consolidated, formatted and distributed to corporate users on a daily basis. Inventory levels in your distribution channel can be monitored for early problem detection to help ensure repeat orders.