Harnessing the power of web scraping for eCommerce

80% of netizens purchase products or services on the Internet. If they aren’t buying from you, they are buying from someone else. If you are someone who runs an online marketplace or if your product is sold online, you'll have to know where your customers are getting their products and why.

Competitive intelligence is the data that gives you valuable insight into your competition and their business tactics. Think of it this way, your competitor's website is actually a goldmine of data . And you could use it to derive business insights.

There are over 26 million eCommerce sites across the entire globe and 10 million of them are in the US alone. There's a huge amount of business data that is publicly accessible for free. All you need is an efficient method of collecting it. And that's where web scraping comes into the picture.

Web scraping for eCommerce

Let's look at some interesting ways in which you could use web scraping to gather competitive intelligence

Price monitoring

• A web scraper can crawl an eCommerce portal, model number by model number, or extract data out of entire categories.
• Taking a cue from price data scraped from the competitor's site you could determine how much to mark up/down price on your site without losing customers.
• You can download scraped data in a spreadsheet to compare your current prices to those on other eCommerce sites for the same products. There's more..

Gather Competitive intelligence

• By web scraping popular sites like Amazon, Walmart etc you'll be able to see the most popular keywords being used in relation to your product and your competitor's product.
• You can find missing product details to enrich your listings to rank better in organic search on both search engines and the site's SERP

Scrape reviews and ratings to analyze customer sentiment

• Scraping reviews and ratings help identify the top sellers and best products in a category.
• You can use the scraped customer reviews for sentiment analysis and gauge product acceptance
• The scraped customer reviews can be used as an idea bank for new product development and feature improvement.
• You can even boost sales by promoting best-rated products

Analyze the product feed and match bids for Ads

• Web scrapers help collect data from targeted sections on the website.
• For instance, you can scrape discounts, promotions, offers, and deals section of the site to understand the competition’s strategy.
• You can scrape the Ads section of a site and bid appropriately for keywords that will showcase your products first.

Now that you've got a glimpse of the various ways in which web scraping can aid eCommerce, you'll want to begin exploring web scraping engines that will assist you in gathering data

ScrapeX.ai's web scraping solutions for eCommerce

ScrapeX is a low-code web scraping automation platform. It helps you create scraper templates for web data extraction on hundreds of URLs. Some perks include:

• Ready-made web scrapers that are pre-configured for scraping popular eCommerce sites like Amazon, eBay, Newegg, etc.
• ScrapeX’s prediction feature helps select elements automatically with a simple click.
• There’s a scripting module where you can perform advanced actions such as filling up forms, logging in, pagination, handling infinite scrolling, etc

No matter your role in the eCommerce sector, you will understand when we say "Data is power". We've built an entire suite of scalable web scraping solutions for use-cases focused on eCommerce. You'll be amazed at how web scraping can transform the way you look at data as a whole.