Price scraping is the automated collection of listed prices from shops so the collector can compare, copy, or track them.
It is a narrow form of copying page content, focused on the number a seller shows for a product.
How it works
A program requests product pages, reads the displayed amount, and stores it with the item identity and time.
Competitors, comparison services, and resellers use those streams to watch moves that a person could not refresh by hand.
For the shop, heavy collection adds load, reveals pricing strategy, and can feed automated undercutting.
The act is about prices, not about copying articles, images, or whole catalogs for their own sake.
Concrete examples
- A rival checks a key product every few minutes and matches any public discount before noon.
- A comparison site polls many shops overnight and republishes the amounts the next morning.
- A reseller tracks a scarce item and buys only when the listed price dips under a chosen line.
Protective measures
- Serve prices to browsers at a human pace and challenge clients that reread the same items continuously.
- Watch request patterns that cycle through the catalog in identifier order with almost no other browsing.
- Keep internal price rules off the public page so only the customer facing amount can be collected.
- Use caches and request caps so price collection cannot crowd out people who are actually buying.
How CDPCaptcha helps
A proof of work task raises the cost of scripted price collection because each fetch must finish a small computation first.
CDPCaptcha is a self-hosted proof of work check in the browser, with no cookies, no tracking, and no picture puzzles.
It is made and hosted in the EU, in Germany, and the service is described at https://cdpcaptcha.com/.