John DiGiacomo has a new article published on PracticalEcommerce.com: How to Protect Against Scraping of Prices, SKUs.

….storeowners will often scrape prices from their competitors’ websites. By analyzing this data, storeowners can reduce their cart abandonment rates, obtain insight into their competitors’ inventory, and ensure that their goods are competitively priced — on the fly.

Second, corrupt merchants will often use this sort of data to clone a competitor’s website, from its look and feel, which is tried and tested, to its product list. Cloning sites in this manner allows a would-be merchant to gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace by using a formula that has been proven to work, without the costs and time associated with startup and testing.

Ecommerce storeowners can protect against these types of tactics by implementing a terms-of-use agreement tailored to their business and by regularly filing for copyright registration of their website content. I will address each of these protections in turn.

Read the entire article on price and SKU scraping on PracticalEcommerce.com.

Do you run an ecommerce website? Contact us to discuss your terms-of-use agreements and copyright registration at 855-473-8474.