How Data Boutique Works #1: Data Auctions
The data auction system explained
About Data Boutique
Data Boutique is the data marketplace for web scraping. We make buying and selling data faster and safer for everyone.
How Data Boutique Works #1: Data Auctions
Data Auctions
Data Boutique is a web-scraped data marketplace where prices are set with an auction system between buyers and sellers.
Prices are public and transparent to everyone.
What is negotiated: The price for a full website scan
Sellers and buyers negotiate the price of a full website scan of a single date.
Example:
In this example, the Seller asks 6.00 EUR for a full Mr. Porter's scan.
If I wanted to purchase this dataset once, I’d pay 6.00 EUR. If I wanted to have the same dataset every week for a year, the cost would be 24 EUR in a month (4 weeks) or 312 EUR in a year (52 weeks).
When buyers and sellers negotiate, they negotiate on the 6 EUR price.
Each website is negotiated and priced independently: The Norauto dataset is priced differently than the Mr Porter dataset.
Buyers: the maximum price willing to pay (bid)
Buyers can express the highest price they are willing to pay (bid). This will be visible anonymously to all sellers.
Bids can be placed on existing websites (those already trading on Data Boutique) and websites not yet listed (where a seller is not offering it for a price yet).
Example: A dataset is has an asked price of 50 EUR, and a buyer bids for 10 EUR. All sellers get notified of the bid. If someone finds it profitable, they may accept, or continue negotiating.
If a bid (buyer’s price) is too low, it might not attract sellers, as they will not profit from it.
Factor buyers need to consider before making a bid:
Urgency: The more urgency, the higher the price, as you need an attractive offer.
Commitment: In the eyes of a seller, buying data only once is less interesting than buying data every week or every day for a year. This information is part of your bid, so one-off purchases might need a higher bid price than continuous (daily, weekly) ones to be considered interesting.
Availability: If a website is not yet on Data Boutique, the bid would be the sole revenue for the seller. Being the first to ask a website might require a more generous bid to be attractive.
Sellers: The minimum price willing to take (ask)
When a dataset is published, the price shown is the asked price.
The asked price is public and applied to all buyers.
When an ask is too high, few (or no) buyers will purchase it, as they will find more convenient ways to collect it, or their case study will not be profitable anymore.
Factors sellers need to consider before setting the asked price
Existing vs. new extractions: You are a seller. If you are already scraping a website, the additional costs to list on Data Boutique are minimal, and you can afford to ask for a lower price. Building a new extraction from scratch will cost you more. List first the ones you do, you have more margins.
First is better than lowest: It is less efficient to engage in price downward spirals with other sellers than it is to be the only one serving that website. If you can choose, go for the one with no other sellers.
Buyer alternatives: This is the real price cap. Buyers always have the alternatives of commissioning web scraping to someone else or web scraping internally, so the price must be considered competitive against that. If the price asked is too high, some buyers might even decide to desist and not pursue the dataset anymore.
Pre-negotiation
Buyers often are not ready to buy. They need a price quote before they can make a decision.
Sellers, on their side, don’t want to pay the extraction costs if they are unsure they will make the sale.
This is where pre-negotiations step in: They state intentions to buy and sell under specific conditions before money is spent or data is extracted.
Example: A buyer might be interested in a website, but has no idea about the cost. They bid for 10 EUR (with no additional information, buyers will bid low). A seller replies the minimum ask will be 100 EUR (they have no additional reassurance of future purchases so they ask high). The buyer may then consider raising the bid to 30 EUR, including a commitment to weekly data refreshes. This will be more attractive for sellers.
Additional options like automatic purchase (AP) - the automatic execution of the order when a seller matches the bid - or Delivery Assurance Deposit (DAD), a small confirmation fee deposited to the seller upon delivery, deducted from the final price if the buyer confirms the purchase, are also methods of lowering the risks from buyers and sellers involved in the trade.
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