Web Scraping with PHP: Building a Competitor Price Monitoring Tool

Depending on your business's niche and market, adjusting your services and prices has to come along with taking your competitors into account.
In a lot of companies that I have seen, this is a manual task, that is completed once every quarter or at least every year.
In this PHP web scraping tutorial, we are going to build a tiny tool, that automizes this process. Of course, the tool will need further advancements, but is always about understanding the concepts, right? :)

Let's get started!

Prerequisites

We will need the following set of tools:

• Web server with PHP
• Composer
• Guzzle - scraping client
• PHP HTML Parser - as HTML Parser
• A currency parser

Download composer here to download the composer and follow the install instructions.

After composer has successfully been installed, install guzzle via composer:

composer require guzzlehttp/guzzle

Next, let's install our HTML parser:

composer require paquettg/php-html-parser

Finally, we add the currency parser to our project:

composer require mcuadros/currency-detector dev-master

Building the scraper

As we want to build a competitor price monitoring tool, let's say that this product URL is our own:

https://www.allendalewine.com/products/11262719/diplomatico-reserva-exclusiva

As a competitor page, we select the following:

https://www.winetoship.com/diplomatico-rum-reserva-exclusiva.html

Next, we have to define the CSS-Selectors that contain the price information.

For our "own" website, the selector is .sale-price.currency. Going through the same process for the competitor, the selector is .less-price .o_price span.

Putting the pieces together, we end up with the following script:

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use \GuzzleHttp\Client;
use \PHPHtmlParser\Dom;
use \CurrencyDetector\Detector;


$productPairs = [
    'rum' => [
        'own' => [
            'url' => 'https://www.allendalewine.com/products/11262719/diplomatico-reserva-exclusiva',
            'selectorPath' => '.sale-price.currency'
        ],
        'competitor1' => [
            'url' => 'https://www.winetoship.com/diplomatico-rum-reserva-exclusiva.html',
            'selectorPath' => '.less-price .o_price span'
        ]
    ]
    # you can add as many product pairs as you wish
];

$detector = new Detector();

$comparison = [];

foreach ($productPairs as $productName => $pair) {


    foreach($pair as $provider => $product) {

        $client = new Client();
        $parser = new Dom;

        $request = $client->request('GET', $product['url']);
        $response = (string) $request->getBody();
        $parser->loadStr($response);
        $price = $parser->find($product['selectorPath'])[0];
        $priceString = $price->text;

        $fmt = new NumberFormatter( 'en_US', NumberFormatter::CURRENCY );

        $comparison[$productName][$provider] = [
            'currency' => $detector->getCurrency($priceString),
            'amount' => $detector->getAmount($priceString),
        ];     

    }
}

echo json_encode($comparison);

You can add as many product and competitor entities as you like. The scraper then loops through all products and competitors and fetches the HTML-Markup. Our DOM-Parser then extracts the related elements from the HTML. Finally, the currency detector parses the price string into a comparable and normalized format.

I used the following PHP web scraping tutorial to create this scraper.