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The counterpoint is 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'?

Sure you might be willing to build the bot to scrape it... but some other competitors won't go to this effort so it still means a bit of information asymmetry and stops some of your competitors poaching customers / employing various marketing tactics to exploit short term shortages or pricing charges etc.

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I really don't believe we're in a situation where a company can exploit product availability and pricing data, is pushing enough volume to make it worth it, can process that information effectively, yet cannot hire someone on Fiverr to write a scraper in a few hours.

> 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'?

To lessen the issue from the article and free up server resources for actual customers.

That depends - scrapers are currently annoying and temperamental and you have to maintain them. Also the idea of allowing some random person from Fiverr to write some code you are going to have running in your infra that has access to your webshop, ERP and the open internet isn't usually that palatable to most IT teams.

A simple and reliable API? That's different.

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