Pricing Wars: How Wal-Mart bots get blocked by Amazon

Competing effectively in the ever growing world of online retail becomes harder day by day. In case you aren’t fighting with true weapons against your rivals, your rivals could undercut your efforts.

Early this year, Reuters has published one report about battle of the shopping ‘bots’ among Wal-Mart and Amazon.

According to this report, engineers at Wal-Mart who track rivals’ prices online got a rude surprise: The technology they were using to check Amazon.com several million times a day suddenly stopped working.

Losing access to Amazon’s data was no small matter. Like most big retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on competitors’ websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing a sale.

But a new tactic by Amazon to block these programs—known commonly as robots or bots—thwarted the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer. Dexterity with bots allows Amazon not only to see what its rivals are doing, but increasingly to keep them in the dark when it undercuts them on price or is quietly charging more.

Wal-Mart’s technology unit was unable to work around the blockade for weeks, forcing it to retrieve Amazon’s data through a secondary source.

However, a Wal-Mart spokesman declined to discuss the January episode but, he said that “The company improves its technology regularly and has multiple tools for tracking items. The company offers value not only through pricing but from discounts for in-store pickup and other benefits”.

A spokeswoman for Amazon said the company is aware of competitors using bots to check its listings and denied any “campaign” to stop them. “Nothing has changed recently in how we manage bots on our site,” she said. Still, she said, “we prioritize humans over bots as needed.”

Even though they continue to deny it, it is a well-known fact that Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world, does its best to prevent automated price monitoring tools like Price2Spy.

Apparently, persistent system administrators have been paying a lot of attention on analyzing their site’s traffic and ultimately began blocking web-scraping tools. No matter what, Price2Spy has successfully avoided classic ban techniques by using a powerful weapon to avoid such blocks for Amazon and similar sites – Stealth IP Traffic.

We would like to inform you that we have monitored Amazon for our clients over the years and doubtless, will continue to monitor it without any bigger problems.

It is natural that some sites don’t want to be monitored and will do everything to avoid price checking activities from their competitors and price monitoring tools, however, the advance in technology works both ways, so we at Price2Spy will continue to explore new ways to avoid bans – and our guess is Wal-Mart will, too!