Currently, the success and expansion of eCommerce sites are influenced by access to relevant data, having tools for analyzing it, and making wise choices based on analysis. Sadly, the majority of this data is not accessible. Here’s where web scraping comes in. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website and storing it for future analysis. It has countless other applications for eCommerce websites.
In this blog, we have explained to you how eCommerce sites can use web scraping to improve their services and boost sales. Additionally, read how web scraping services and automated tools are a better alternative than manually copying and pasting a significant quantity of data.
What Is Web Scraping of eCommerce Websites?
eCommerce website data scraping is a technique for extracting essential information from a large number of web pages by using automated tools or manually (copy-pasting). The extraction focuses on eCommerce platforms and online retail stores. The collected data is imported into a database or spreadsheet in a well-structured form for human or machine usage. eCommerce owners can use this data for performing analysis, modifying their marketing strategies, determining customer preferences, and forecasting future trends. For many years, web scraping has benefited many eCommerce sites like Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, eBay, and many more.
How Web Scraping Can Help with Your eCommerce eStore?
Here are some ways that web scraping can help you to increase your sales.
1. Monitor Market Prices
With the abundance of online retailers, most of the sites sell similar products at just different prices. In such cases, price becomes the deciding factor for customers to buy products. Moreover, 94% of online shoppers invest time to find the lowest price for commodity products. eCommerce owners need to conduct comprehensive research and accurately price their products to boost conversions while preserving margins. Here’s where you can use the web scraping technique.
Web data scraping helps eCommerce sites to track changes in market pricing and promotional events in real time. This, in turn, helps them to understand what other customers are willing to pay and the typical rates in the market. Later on, you can set the price of the product accordingly. For instance, if you sell a product with little competition, you can increase the price and make more profit than before. If you sell the product higher than all your competitors, it's time to give some discounts and lower the price. Therefore, price monitoring helps you adjust your product pricing and increase the chance of sales.
2. Understand Market Trends
As an eCommerce seller, staying ahead of the competition is necessary if you want to expand your firm. There are millions of vendors out there competing for a higher market share. Therefore, you need to be aware of what's changing and how consumers act. Data scraping is a useful tool for identifying such e-Commerce market trends and consumer behavior.
An automated web scraping tool helps you draw real-time data including names, descriptions, prices, the publishing date of the product, and whether or not they are trending. You can scrape this data from different websites like WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix, Magento, and other e-Commerce websites and marketplaces with active businesses. Once you receive the details, perform an analysis to understand the market demands. This will help you fill the areas lagging, improve your strategies and increase your sales.
3. Generate More Leads
Web scraping is a quick and simple method for generating more leads. It helps you scrape various websites and social media handles to draw relevant information for your website. For instance, if you want to draw more customers for your product, you can scrape a hundred similar websites out there and gather information. Then further classify these data to understand which customer is looking for the relevant products. Later, you can scrape further with specific criteria to draw their contact information, social media accounts, zip codes, and other information. This way, you can bring in more leads for your business.
Additionally, when you scrape other websites, you learn about the challenges that top rivals experience while trying to market their items to clients. Afterward, you can avoid repeating similar problems from happening onwards.
4. Improve Customer Sentiment Analysis
The most important thing to consider while selling products in the competitive market is how the customer feels about the product and competitors' products. For this, web scraping will help you extract data from social media handles, feedback forms, comments, and reviews on websites.
After extraction, you can perform in-depth sentiment analysis and research to understand what people are saying about your product online. Machine learning technologies may be immediately trained to discern emotions from text and to spot problems consumers are having with your product using the scraped consumer review data. This entire procedure will help you improve your current products. Moreover, it will help add new products according to customers' preferences, opinions, and demands.
5. Increase Visibility
Most online shoppers search for products on search engines and 80% of them click on the top 5 results to buy products. Hence, you need to enhance your brand's organic SEO methods in order to get it among the top Google search results. Web scraping helps to extract and arrange SERP positions and keywords important to rank high. With the help of the information, you may choose keywords that increase your likelihood of appearing higher in search results. Moreover, you can analyze the type of content required for your website. This will help you write new blogs and articles to attract more customers.
6. Improve Product Listing
Rich product description pages not only inform customers about the characteristics and advantages of your product- improving conversion rates; but they also help your website to rank better in search engine results, bringing in more organic search traffic. Herein, you can use web scraping to extract product listing from various websites and compare it to yours. This way, you can identify the part where you lag and enhance your product listing pages with photographs, descriptions, product specs, and reviews.
How to Extract Product Data from eCommerce Websites?
If you've ever manually scraped data from a website and then copied and pasted it, you've already done the same task as a web scraper. However, eCommerce sites require a large amount of data and can’t rely on manual scrapping. They have to;
- Build a customized web scraper: The automatic web scraping tool is quite useful since it is specifically made for your organization. You can hire web developers to build tools. Customized tools focused on your company's needs and scrape information from the best eCommerce websites. Moreover, it guarantees speedy data collection.
- Invest in third-party tools: If you don’t want to hire developers or build your own tool, you can buy web scraping tools. There are plenty of tools available in the market that provide high-end scraping solutions. Note that you have to perform in-depth research before buying one. Some examples are Octoparse and Parsehub.
- Outsource web scraping services: If you want to scrap real-time data in no time, try outsourcing a web scraping company. These companies have a good infrastructure that will provide you with the greatest results. They are skilled data scraping experts with broad industry expertise that can scrape data according to your needs. Moreover, they help you avoid the hassle of hiring and building tools, which directly reduces your cost. Make sure to compare various scrapping companies before hiring one.
Conclusion
Overall, web scraping is an essential tool for an eCommerce store. It can help them scrap plenty of data. By downloading and analyzing data in large quantities, you can gain a more accurate understanding of your market and the activities of your competitors. This will allow you to make better business decisions.
However, it is illegal to gather and utilize data if it is private or otherwise protected by laws, copyright, etc. If so, the eCommerce authority from which you are attempting to scrape data may file a lawsuit against you. It would also be illegal to attempt to hack into eCommerce sites. Hence, avoid gathering information from a site that is not in the public domain. Moreover, if you find it too complex to understand which is a legal way to scrap, try contacting companies that offer data extraction services. These companies are certified for scraping data legally.
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